**SPOILERS** When hostage negotiator Lt. Phoebe McNamara got under the skin of fellow cop Arnie Meeks on showing him up in how to do his job things started to get hot an heavy between the two flatfoots. This happened when Officer Meeks was on the scene when a hostage taker ended up blowing his brains out before Phoebe, who should have been called earlier by Meeks, had a chance to talk him out of doing it.
Given a 30 day suspension by his boss Lt. Phoebe McNamara Meeks just couldn't help himself in taking it out on her to the point where he attacked Phoebe right in the police station stairway, wearing a ski mask, almost breaking her jaw. It's later that Phoebe is again targeted by some unseen psycho but by then it's obvious that Meeks isn't the guy. It's someone from Phoebe's past who holds her personally responsible for the death, while being held hostage, of someone very near and dear to him.
The film "High Noon" never really takes off with Lt. Phoebe McNamara and her new found boyfriend lottery winner and bar owner Ducan Swift being stalked by an unseen and deranged lunatic all throughout the movie. The guy goes so far as to gun down young hostage taker Charles "Raz" Jackson just as Phoebe was about to have him give himself up to the police just to make her look bad.
Fantasizing himself to be the late actor Gary Cooper, he even insist on being called Cooper by the police, the killer want's to replay the climatic shoot-out scene in the movie "High Noon" with him, as far as I can tell, playing the parts of both the good and bad guys in the film. He's also obsessed with clocks-that dominated the 1952 movie "High Noon"-that he sets his explosives with all to detonate at the 12 O'clock mark! The movie ends with Phoebe going against her better judgment and using, or having her fellow cops use, deadly force in finally putting the killer on ice, in the city morgue, only after he was just about to release the people that he was holding hostage! What shocked me about this is that Phoebe did far worse then what Officer Meeks did, not preventing a hostage holder from killing himself, and what she had him suspended from the force for!
Very uneven crime drama from the pen or typewriter of Nora Roberts with a number of confusing sub-plots, like Phoebe's shut-in mom Essie, that made the film even far more disjointed then it already was it that's at all possible.
