I am surprised there are no Deaver books reviewed in the blog, especially given his genre and his prolific writing. I remember reading The Bone Collector but that must have been several years ago and more than a year before we started this blog project. This is a murder mystery that starts with the killing of a couple, the woman, Emma Feldman, a high powered attorney, and her husband, Steven, a social worker. The murder takes place in rural and remote Wisconsin, and that brings us to the primary character, Deputy Kristen Brynn McKenzie. There is a gradual character development of Brynn throughout the book that is closely tied to the unfolding of the mystery. Her boss, Sheriff Tom Dahl and other members of the Kennesha County, Wisconsin Sheriff’s Department take on peripheral roles. Another woman is intimately involved who Brynn discovers in the woods near the cabin where the murders occurred, and then they are both hunted by the killers. A significant portion of the book is the chase/hunt action in the forest, all in the course of one night, and it involves mostly just four characters, the two men who are in pursuit, and the two women. I’m surprised that this section held my interest so closely, but it did, and that is a tribute to Deaver’s unfolding plot, descriptive writing, and character development. This story has a great tie to the mob via a labor boss, Stanley Mankewitz. At any rate, Deaver does a great job with twists in the plot that I did not see coming, just as I thought we were concluding with some of the characters in the book. This is more than an airplane book, and I’ve already bought my next Deaver to read. Given the number of books that he’s written, I’m excited about this “discovery.”
West Coast Don
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