The Bodies Left Behind

The Bodies Left Behind – by Jeffery Deaver

Once you’ve read a fair share of novels by Jeffery Deaver, you learn that you always have to approach one of his books with your “antennae up”.  I don’t think Deaver has ever written a “predictable” story.  Every time you read one of his books – he’ll throw a 180-degree twist in the story once you feel comfortable, and you suddenly realize that nothing is as what you expected, and the good guys turned out to be the bad guys, or vice-versa.

This book isn’t any different.  Brynn Mackenzie is a 30 something year old police officer with a husband and a pre-teenage son.  One day, she gets what appears to be a routine call: Someone from a cell phone dialed 911 and hung up after only being able to speak one word over the phone.  Can Brynn go investigate?  So her investigation takes her to the remote Wisconsin woods where only a few holiday cabins reside.  In other words, a large, woodsy, desolate area with lots of forests and trees.  This can’t be good.

Well, the bulk of this story is a rather silly cat and mouse chase. 80% of the story takes place in these remote woods during a 12-hour window – from about sundown to sunup.  The action really isn’t that believable.  It’s a series of encounters where the bad guys keep chasing the good guys.  Every time that the bad guys get close to capturing the good guys, the good guys pull off some sort of miraculous trick that saves them.  One of these events would be o.k., but these tricks happen over and over again.  Then, the exact same thing happens whenever the good guys are able to almost catch the bad guys.  Again, the bad guys, apparently very smart themselves, manage to pull off ANOTHER miraculous trick that somehow saves THEM. And on and on and on.  It’s a bit ridiculous over 400 pages.  Then, this is supposed to be in the pitch black night, but it’s quite remarkable how well these characters can see each other, supposedly, form hundreds of yards away.  Must be quite the moonlight.

Well, once the pursuit “ends”, we know that all is not as it seems.  After all, this is Jeffery Deaver book.  Plus, we still have about 100 pages to go.  The last 100 pages are no doubt the best as we’re exposed to the enigmas and we start to see everything unravel.  I’ve said it before: even Jeffery Deaver books that don’t seem to be that good always pick up nicely in the end.

Still, though, this book wasn’t one of his best, and it times it seemed like Deaver was spending more attention on how to pull off one of his plot twists than he was on an interesting, believable story.  As it was, I’m still not 100% sure how one of the characters at the end of the story met his fate.  It was a bit messy.  You have to throw a lot of “believability” out the window to truly enjoy this book.  I thought it was good, but not particularly great.