The Bodies Left Behind - Jeffery Deaver
I bought this book at the airport in the duty free CNA for R118.00 - when they saw the price they said it was marked wrong and R80 below price. So I guess it's supposed to cost about R200 plus vat.
This is a good book, though I wouldn't count it with Deaver's greatest. I think he's become a commercial author now and and he's rolling these books out like a sausage machine. Still, a good but commercial book by Deaver is nothing to scoff at, and a lot better than you'd get from many writers. I read the whole book in a non-stop three days, I just couldn't put it down. Like I said, good. Still, it somehow just doesn't satisfy like his other great books.
The heroine of the story is Deputy Brynn Mckenzie. I guess she's going to be the next repeating character in Deaver's books since he took so much trouble developing her as a character and also since he loves to recycle his characters. She's cast as a small town cop in Wisconsin. I went and wiki'd that and it's a US state near the great lakes, one over from Illinois where Chicago is.
Brief summary of the plot:
A 911 call is received from a cellphone, but it gets cut off immediately, after one word: "This..." Brynn is off duty but her house is closest to the remote lake where the cellphone is traced to, so she's asked to check it out. Since it's not really an emergency and all. On arrival at the lake, she finds three holiday cabins, two of which are empty, but the last containing the two bodies of the owners. All hell breaks lose as the apparent killers return. Brynn crashes her car into the lake under fire from the killers, and loses her cellphone and gun in the water. Then she runs into an apparent survivor, a city girl in fashionable clothes, running around the forest. Together they run from the scene with the killers hot on their heals. It turns into a mad, night long chase through the forest. And in usual brilliant Deaver tradition, nothing is what is seems and there's more twists in the tale than almost any other author would keep up with.
When the night is over, the survivors start picking up the pieces and working out what really happened. A period of about two months is covered in this part. The pace slows down a lot in this part and maybe that is why I don't say brilliant instead of good. I guess the pace would have been better if the book concluded at the end of that one crazy night, but then he couldn't put in all the extra twists that happen in the last part. Still, you never know what's going to happen and nothing is what it seems, as usual. So it doesn't disappoint much.
I have to admit that by the end of it, I was rooting for the assassin guy to get away. I guess that is because, unlike Tolkein, Deaver mostly don't hate his characters. He seems to have sympathy for even the worst criminals he writes. There's never a guy you know will not make it from page one. Unless it's a guy who dies on page one.
I guess compared to food, this would be like Dros food. Better than Spur food, yet still commercial. And almost the same recipe as you'd get at your mom's, but not executed quite as well as she does it. But then, who can really match your mom's food?
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