β Scribed by Deaver, Jeffery
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The title applies in several ways to this wicked collection of crime short stories by bestselling author Deaver (The Vanished Man, etc.): to many of the stories' characters and protagonists, who include murderers, adulterers, thieves; to the stories' arcs, which offer numerous bends and surprises; and to the general tone of the tales-as Deaver says in a brief introduction, "In a story, I can make good bad and bad badder and, most fun of all, really bad good." Of the 16 stories, 15 are reprints, some from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, some from its counterpart Alfred Hitchcock, while one, a Christmas tale featuring Deaver's beloved quadriplegic crime-buster Lincoln Rhyme and his sidekick, Amelia Sachs, is original to the anthology. The opening story, "Without Jonathan," is representative of Deaver's approach here. A woman, Marissa, drives along a Maine road, tormented by images of her husband drowning at sea. She's on her way to meet a man, presumably her first date since her husband's death. Cut to the man, shown strangling a woman-is our heroine about to encounter a serial killer? The two meet... and it turns out that he's a hit man hired by Marissa to kidnap her cheating husband aboard the husband's ship, then throw him overboard. And so it goes in story after story, all characterized, in addition to clever plotting, by brisk characterization and compact, efficient prose. The Rhyme/Sachs entry, "The Christmas Present," is the cherry on the tart, as grumpy Rhyme and sweet but dangerous Sachs set out to save a woman from one apparent predator only to have to rescue her from another. Like an afternoon snack, this snappy volume will stave off hunger for Deaver fans until his next novel appears.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Deaver, the author of a string of deliciously convoluted thrillers (his best work is the Lincoln Rhyme series, featuring a quadriplegic crime solver), offers his fans a real treat. This short story collection lives up to its title in more than one way: the stories are twisted, and so are many of the characters, a tasty assortment of murderers, thieves, con artists, and other no-goodniks. The best thing about the stories, however, is that we don't really know what they're about until the very end. Deaver is the grand master of the plot twist: his novels regularly perform elaborate about-faces, making us rethink much of what we believe about a character, a subplot, a seeming coincidence. His short fiction is like that, too: what appears to be a story about a man plotting the perfect murder, for example, becomes, in its final moments, something altogether more chilling. We're stunned, and then we think, OK, that makes perfect sense, but why didn't we see it coming? That's the beauty of a Deaver story: we never see the twist coming. These 16 stories are polished gems, beautiful examples of what splendid intricacies can be wrought in a small space. As an added bonus, one of the stories, featuring Lincoln Rhyme, has never been published before. For Deaver's fans, and any reader who likes that little thrill you get when a story takes an unexpected right-angle turn, this one's an absolute necessity. David Pitt
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
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