A Date with Lima by Dr. Michael Abraham

A sensational and gripping memoir, A Date with Lima: Dreams Not Surrendered by Dr. Michael Abraham recounts the author’s tireless efforts to find his two young daughters when he discovered that their mother abducted them.

In July 1997, Brigitte Abraham told her ex-husband, a doctor and recovering alcoholic twenty years her senior, that she was taking their two children – Stephanie, age 9, and Lia, age 7 – on a vacation to her native Germany. What she did not tell him was that with the help of her boyfriend, a Peruvian foreign diplomat, she planned to disappear with the girls and never return.

Relying on high-level government officials from the U.S., Europe, and South America, a network of lawyers, detectives, family, and friends, the inspiration he received from his beloved University of Michigan football team’s refusal to give up, his faith and the Higher Power extolled in his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and, ultimately, a Hollywood private investigator to the stars, Abraham relentlessly pursued every lead and clue in an effort to find his daughters and bring them home.

This remarkable true story is mostly well-written and nicely paced, but there are some structural and chronological inconsistencies, while some of the material is superfluous to the book’s purpose. On the whole, however, Abraham’s recounting of his past addictions, troubled marriage and custody battles, and the highs and lows of his medical career shed light on how this anguished father found the strength and determination to achieve his goal, even when it seemed impossible.

All told, A Date with Lima is heartwrenching and engrossing – a story that reads like a thrilling work of fiction, but all the more incredible because it is not.