Twisted

Twisted by Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver’s first collection of short stories, and fortunately not his last.  My favorite thing about this author is his ability to fool you.  I can’t recall any of his novels where there wasn’t some sort of bizarre plot twist (or two) near the end of the book that threw you for a loop.  Even after he’s tricked you before and you have your guard up, he still manages to baffle you with his brilliance.

So it really shouldn’t be any sort of surprise that all of these short stories contained here do exactly the same thing – hence the name of the book.  Of course, I thought the title was probably derived from the somewhat sick nature of many of his books (and these stories).  On reflection, you could argue that it’s probably a bit of both.  This guy isn’t known for happy sappy stories.

After reading the first few stories within this collection, even the novice can detect a pattern, and the reader starts to carefully turn the remaining pages, wondering when they’ll be duped again.  There were many instances where I thought “Ahh.  I see where he’s going with this, and I know what he’s going to try to pull”.  Yet Deaver would again prove me wrong, deliberately pulling me in a path where I thought I knew the direction, only to trick me once again.  There was one story that pulled the wool over my eyes in such a clever fashion, that I had to go back and reread the entire thing, just to make sure the ruse was genuine.

Reading these stories reminded me of the old television series “The Twilight Zone”.  Once you became a fan of that show, you simply knew that, even if the first 25 minutes of he program seemed completely normal, something was going to baffle you at the end.  So in a way the shock value wears off once you’re about 75% through with this book, but that doesn’t take away any of the enjoyment.

He even throws in a Lincoln Rhyme short story.  It’s good, but far from the strongest thing here.  The best stories in this compendium seem to revolve around romance and relationships gone bad, and there are quite a few.  Unlike someone like a Stephen King, these stories usually have the good guy (or gal) prevail in the end, and most of them could actually happen in real life – even if they are, severely, twisted.