Jeffery Deaver’s ROADSIDE CROSSES stars Kathryn Dance, his less-frequent series character. She is a kinesics expert — body language — and this expertise makes her a living lie detector, able to size up someone’s personality type and instantly know if he/she is lying or not.

But what Dance doesn’t know about blogs and online gaming could fill a book. Hence, ROADSIDE CROSSES is another of Deaver’s warnings about the dark side of computers and the Internet, but it is sadly not as effective as his Lincoln Rhyme novel of last year, THE BROKEN WINDOW.

The otherwise beautiful scenery along the roadside of Monterey Peninsula in California is marred by a crude, homemade cross made from tree branches and twine, and covered on the bottom with a bouquet of red roses. Affixed to the cross is a date, one day ahead of when a local policeman discovered it. Soon, local law enforcement discovers that the cross is not a memorial, but rather an announcement of an impending murder attempt.
 
As an investigator for the California Bureau of Investigation, Dance is called in when a local teen girl is found in the trunk of her car near the oceanside. What saved the girl from drowning was a slight miscalculation by the perpetrator. But when Dance questions the girl, she immediately concludes that the youth is hiding some important truth.
 
A laptop is among the items retrieved from the girl’s car, and further investigation into the computer’s contents reveal that she was a frequent contributor of posts to a popular blog called The Chilton Report. In particular, the girl and several others posted reactions to a story in the Report of a recent car accident in which two teenage girls were killed, and the driver of the car, a boy named Travis Brigham, becomes the target of online ridicule and blame.
 
Dance looks deeper and leans that Brigham is a socially inept teen who loses himself for hours at a time in an ornate, online role-playing game called DIMENSIONQUEST. But before she can investigate further, Brigham disappears and more roadside crosses — and more attempted murders — occur. Dance is certain that Brigham, a victim of “cyberbullying,” has gone over the edge and is carrying out a series of revenge aimed at those who taunted him on the blog.
 
A large amount of time is devoted to educating Dance — via a local and slightly love-struck professor — about the proliferation, popularity and underestimated power of blogs, as well as online gaming and gamers. It’s essential to understanding the story, but there is so much to take in that we risk losing sight of the attempted murders.
 
Deaver seriously misfires on the popularity of The Chilton Report. It is difficult to believe that such a politically oriented blog, even with its centrist leanings, would appeal so much to the teenagers who dominate most of the novel. Something more akin to a local gossip blog would have made more sense. But the author wanted his blogger, James Chilton, to be an educated, experienced champion of freedom of expression on the web, especially when it is suggested that Chilton shut down the blog to prevent any further attempted murders.

Then there is a distracting subplot involving Dance’s mother, who is a nurse at a local hospital, and a case of euthanasia. The accusations and legal maneuvers go on for too long and add nothing to the overall narrative.
 
Deaver also stumbles whenever he tries to assume the vernacular of teens and their conversations, both online and especially out loud. He relies on prefacing dialogue passages with “like” simply to remind us that it is a teenager talking. It makes for painful reading. And it is never revealed why such an Internet- and web-obsessed killer would resort to such a low-tech device as a roadside cross to announce his murderous intentions.
 
As is typical for a Deaver novel, there are plot twists and surprises aplenty. But where these and other similar Deaver techniques were so effective in detailing the horrors of identity theft in THE BROKEN WINDOW, here they only distract and delay the final, somewhat awkward resolution.
 
None of these shortcomings are likely to keep Deaver’s fans from devouring the novel. For everyone else, what might have been a very timely warning about the misuses of unrestricted expression online falls short of its mark, due to its own misunderstanding of blogs and their readers. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND by Jeffery Deaver
• THE BROKEN WINDOW by Jeffery Deaver
• MANHATTAN IS MY BEAT by Jeffery Deaver
• MORE TWISTED: COLLECTED STORIES, VOL. II by Jeffery Deaver