As the title strongly hints, Jeffery Deaver’s THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND is one of those thrillers that starts out with a grab-you-by-the-throat premise: A married couple enjoying a weekend retreat find that bliss is short-lived — and so are they — when their Wisconsin woods home is suddenly invaded by two armed, masked intruders. Our victims become the corpses of the title, and were the targets of a hit.
But what the hired guns didn’t count on was a third person in the house: a friend named Michelle who manages to shoot one of the guys in the shoulder. Coming to Michelle’s aid — thanks to the husband’s brief dialing of 911 just before his expiration — is Brynn, a local sheriff’s deputy.
So the guys want to shoot the girls to make sure there are no witnesses to their crime, and the girls want to shoot the guys out of self-preservation, and thus begins a maddening circular plot akin to watching a dog chase his own tail. There are only so many times one group can escape the other and turn the tables before it gets old, and sadly — not to mention uncharacteristically for Deaver — that threshold is reached awfully early.
The better part of BODIES lies with Brynn’s second husband, left at home and worrying about her return as he tries to make headway with his troubled stepson and headstrong mother-in-law. These scenes are more engaging and exciting than the main action, no matter how many rigged buckets of ammonia the latter has in store.
Ultimately, this is a minor effort in the Deaver oeuvre — one that I hope is not the start of a new series, because I didn’t find its heroine(s) all that appealing. If he’s looking for a new character to wring a few titles out of, I’m still pulling for the police statistician he introduced in Ed McBain’s TRANSGRESSIONS anthology a few years back. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE BROKEN WINDOW by Jeffery Deaver
• MANHATTAN IS MY BEAT by Jeffery Deaver
• MORE TWISTED: COLLECTED STORIES, VOL. II by Jeffery Deaver
