The Goodbye Man

 

The Goodbye Man – by Jeffery Deaver

The second Coulter Shaw novel by Jeffery Deaver. I’m not really sure what to think of Coulter Shaw. Sometimes I wish Jeffery Deaver would write more standalone novels that don’t involve reoccurring characters.  In this instance, I really didn’t enjoy reading the “side story” of Coulter involving his history and personal quest which deviated from the main plot too much. We were introduced to all of this in novel #1, and I suppose we’ll keep uncovering more about Coulter Shaw’s background in the following novels.

The main story in this novel is decent, but it lacked what I’ve come to expect with Jeffery Deaver novels.  There was no “twist” in this one. Sorry if that’s a spoiler. This is kind of what I’ve come to expect, and when there wasn’t one, I felt somehow like I had been gypped.

Coulter Shaw is sort of a private bounty hunter who makes his living off collecting rewards from those who want resolutions and answers.  As this story opens, things get a bit complicated when one of his targets does something completely unexpected and leads Coulter into investigating a bizarre cult where the individual once resided.   Well, you’ve read one bizarre cult novel, you’ve kind of read them all.

So most of this story is immersed in a woodsy isolated area surrounded by a somewhat twisted leader. Of course, the promises this cult gives to would-be members is quite appealing for the desperate, so naturally it’s quite expensive to join such an assembly.  Once joined, there are a lot of rules and everything revolves around the odd charismatic leader. Coulter joins the cult under a pseudonym, and he immediately smells a rat. His detective work leads him to uncover all sorts of manipulation and unpleasantries of this farce of a group as he must immerse himself in this cluster to find answers.

There really isn’t that much else to say, really. Again, we read about Coulter’s rather strange upbringing as it’s supposed to influence us and help us understand his behavior and decisions a bit better.  When Coulter was young, he was raised in the wilderness along with his siblings by parents were a tad odd.  His father focused on “survival” skills. Coulter and his siblings never had anything like a normal childhood.  Who has time to watch television, when the father would rather dump them in the woods as pre-teens with no clothes and no food in order to teach them how to hunt and survive?  So we read quite a bit about this in addition to the comings and goings of the cult.

A pleasant read, but definitely not one of Deaver’s best.