While the major plot of This Stranger, My Father is straightforward and simple, the progression of events from the start of the story to its climax is complex and suspenseful. The fifteen chapters of the novel are connected and continuous. The author uses several literary devices to sustain interest and engender excitement.

The events in This Stranger, My Father take place in real times and places.

While the events are fictional, they could have happened. More frightening is the idea conveyed that the events might happen to anyone under even the most ordinary of circumstances. A sense of reality is heightened through the author's use of actual historical events of the time of the crime that precipitated the current events. The current time of the story is twenty years after the 1960s when John F. Kennedy was President of the United States, haircuts were short, and...