The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel

Overview

When a night-time call to 911 from a secluded Wisconsin vacation house is cut short, offduty deputy Brynn McKenzie leaves her husband and son at the dinner table and drives up to Lake Mondac to investigate. Was it a misdial or an aborted crime report?

Brynn stumbles onto a scene of true horror and narrowly escapes from two professional criminals. She and a terrified visitor to the weekend house, Michelle, flee into the woods in a race for their lives. As different as night and day, and stripped of modern-day resources, Brynn, a tough deputy with a difficult past, and Michelle, a pampered city girl, must overcome their natural reluctance to trust each other and learn to use their wits and courage to survive the relentless pursuit. The deputy's disappearance spurs both her troubled son and her new husband into action, while the incident sets in motion Brynn's loyal fellow deputies and elements from Milwaukee's underside. These various forces race along inexorably toward the novel's gritty and stunning conclusion.

The Bodies Left Behind is an epic cat-and-mouse chase, told nearly in real-time, and is filled with Deaver's patented twists and turns, where nothing is what it seems, and death lingers just around the next curve on a deserted path deep in the midnight forest.

Editorial Reviews

Usually a strong plotter, bestseller Deaver (The Bone Collector) fails to deliver on the promise of this stand-alone thriller's nicely creepy opening. When two masked men break into the isolated lakeside weekend house of Steven Feldman, who works for the Milwaukee Department of Social Services, and his wife, Emma, an attorney who may have stumbled on union corruption in the course of some corporate research, Steven has just enough time to phone 911 before the intruders shoot him and Emma dead. That interrupted plea for help brings Deputy Brynn McKenzie, who possesses a set of predictable emotional baggage (an abusive ex-wife, a troubled teenage son), to the scene. A protracted and less than suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse between McKenzie and the hired guns responsible for the murders ensues. A few twists will catch some readers by surprise, but the pacing and characterizations aren't up to Deaver's best. (Nov.)

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Author Information

Bio of Jeffery Deaver

Jeffrey Deaver was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his journalism degree from the University of Missouri and his law degree from Fordham University. Before attending law school, Deaver worked as a business writer, writing poetry in his spare time, as well as songs, which he traveled around the country and performed. After law school, Deaver got a job with a Wall Street law firm practicing corporate law. He later quit practicing law, in 1990 to write full time. His first novel was entitled "Voodoo," a horror story, his first and only book of that kind. Deaver went on to write suspense novels, including "A Maiden's Grave," which was made into a film by HBO called "Dead Silence." His novel "The Bone Collector" was made into a feature film by Universal Pictures featuring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He writes short stories for Ellery Queen Readers and Alfred Hitchcock magazines. Deaver is a 4 time Edgar Award nominee as well as having received the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year twice. He is the author of fifteen novels and has written some of those stories under the pseudonym William Jeffries.

Customer Reviews

• who wrote this book/????

  Posted January 05, 2009 by d, central mass

  i was VERY disappointed in this book not up to his standard at all. It seemed like a typical deaver book at first but somewhere in the middle it lost its grip and never regained its balance. concept was good but nothing was really tied up well in the end almost like a ghost writer finished up this book.... lets pray that deaver's next book does not leave me feeling like i wasted time and money.

Additional Info

Imprint

Simon & Schuster

Filesize

962.16 KB

Number of Pages

368

eBook ISBN

1416599983