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Intrigue, death, blood and love weren’t enough
Book Review
By Derryll White
Deaver, Jeffery (2008). The Bodies Left Behind
One thing about being on an extended visit to a foreign country with a substantially different language, a reader has to be flexible.
Ystad, Sweden, actually has a wide collection of English-language novels in the Bibliotek, but not what I normally read. I picked Jeffery Deaver because we sell him at Lotus Books so I thought this read might help me know our customers’ tastes better.
‘The Bodies Left Behind’ is a true suspense novel. There are chases, deaths, intrigues, deaths and surprises. Oh, did I mention deaths? The story is told in a straight forward manner. The writing is workman-like, precise and careful with little extra. Deaver is good at building excitement. There are dead bodies and blood everywhere.
At the end I was left wanting more. All the plot twists and turns worked out. The good people triumphed. But as a reader I felt that I hadn’t got a good return on my investment. I hadn’t come across any pieces of writing that stopped me, made me think and excited me. I hadn’t learned anything that informed me about the state of the world I live in. I guess intrigue, death, blood and love aren’t enough for me anymore. I want the writer to exhibit uncommon skill. I want the story to make me stop and think about love, politics, sex – the world I live in. Jeffery Deaver didn’t do that for me so I have removed him from my “must read” list.
Excerpts from the novel
DRUGS: Even here, in Kennesha [Wisconsin], a county with the sparse population of 34,021, meth was a terrible scourge. The users, tweakers, were ruthless, crazed and absolutely desperate to get the product; cookers felt exactly the same about the huge profits they made.
WISCONSIN – He didn’t know the town well, but assumed it was like a thousand others in Wisconsin: a gas station, a grocery store that sold as much beer as milk and a restaurant that was harder to find than the local meth cooker. They have houses there?
FEAR – The young woman stopped walking altogether. Her eyes were wide and she gestured broadly with twitchy hands. “I shop at Whole Foods. I buy coffee at Starbucks. This isn’t me [wilderness], this isn’t my world. I can’t do it!”
LABOUR – … the final words of one of the men sentenced to hang for his role in the Haymarket Massacre [1886], August Spies (who, like all the defendants, scholars believed, was probably innocent). Spies had said, ‘The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.’
Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
