Review: The Bodies Left Behind

Essentially a heart-pounding chase, Deaver’s stand-alone thriller pits a tough small-town Wisconsin deputy against a soulless professional killer and his cocky sidekick.

In trademark fashion, Deaver takes a simple crime, imagines all the things that can go wrong and keeps them coming so fast it’s all you can do to remember to breathe. Then he slips in some personal complications, muddies the lines with back-story, casts doubt on everybody and juggles it all with multiple viewpoints and short, cliff-hanging chapters.

Deputy Brynn McKenzie leaves the family dinner scene - newish husband, troubled teenage son and convalescing mother – to follow up on an aborted 911 call from a remote lakeside vacation home. Expecting a false alarm, she stumbles into carnage and chaos.

The city couple who own the house are dead and the killers are still on scene, their getaway foiled by the couple’s weekend visitor, a woman who winged one of the killers, then shot out the tires of their and her hosts’ cars and ran off into the woods.

Why did she do this, thereby trapping herself with the killers? Well, she is something of a ditz, as Brynn soon discovers. In one of the book’s less believable scenes, the panicked woman balks at trading her designer footwear for hiking boots as – without transportation, weapon, or phone – Brynn plots their getaway from men determined to leave no witnesses. But as the chase gets going the rescued woman thankfully grows a bit less whiny and a bit more resourceful. The ending is a maze of twists and turns, some the reader will guess, and some surprises.

Darkness, remote woods, a battle of wits and ruthlessness – just the thing to cozy up with on a cold evening. Deaver gives the plot a bit more heft with a shady union connection and a fixer set on joining the chase. Brynn’s husband and bratty son are less compelling, but you got to have the human element, right?

Pure escapism, this tale requires some suspension of disbelief – but these days even the morning paper defies belief, so leave your worries behind and jump on for a wild and scary ride.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

Please Note: Books reviewed are usually provided by the publisher, author, or an agent. Reviewers usually get to keep the book.

Book Review: The Bodies Left Behind

Please Note: Books reviewed are usually provided by the publisher, author, or an agent. Reviewers usually get to keep the book.