SOURCE: A review of Nathan's Run, in Publisher's Weekly, Vol. 242, No. 51, December 18, 1995, p. 39.

[Below, the critic offers a favorable review of Nathan's Run, calling the book a "brilliantly calculated debut."]

Gilstrap is a first-novelist, but you wouldn't know it from his brilliantly calculated debut. With the skill of a veteran pulp master, he weaves a library's worth of melodramatic clichés into a yarn that demands to be read in one sitting. Eponymous Nathan isn't any old 12-year-old; he's a kid, shades of Dickens, who was unjustly thrown into a juvenile detention center and raped his first night there. Now the boy's on the lam, having escaped the center after killing a guard who for some mysterious reason tried to stab him to death. Crying for Nathan's blood are an ambitious politician and vengeful cops, as well as a sadistic mob hit man who aims to finish what...