Amazon.com Exclusive: Jeffery Deaver on Devil s
Jeffery Deaver is the bestselling author of The Broken Window,
The ing Doll, The Cold Moon, The Blue Nowhere, The
Collector, The Empty Chair, The Devil's Teardrop, and fifteen
other suspense novels. His book A Maiden's Grave was made into an
HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel
The Collector was made into a feature release from Universal
Pictures, starring Denzel Washington. He lives in North Carolina.
It's always a pleasure to see a new installment in the saga of
Temperence Brennan, the forensic anthropologist who plies her
trade in both Charlotte, North Carolina, and Montreal.
Devil s, set in the U S of A, opens with a grisly discovery
that offers a very different take on This Old House. Tempe is
pulled from staid academia to investigate the troubling and
mystifying scene, which involves cauldrons, ceremonial religious
artifacts and, most troubling, the severed head of a teenage
girl.
Another torso is located nearby, and the story is off and
running.
Tempe and Charlotte department detective Erskine "Skinny"
Slidell, follow leads that take them through the seamier and the
chicer sides of North Carolina's largest city--the worlds of
Santeria, voodoo, the Wiccan religion (any witches out there: I'm
not lumping them together!), and male prostitution. Our heroine
also locks horns with a crusading minister turned politician, and
there's a reporter who manages to show up at all the wrong
moments.
Reichs juggles the questions of who done it (and who's gonna get
done next) until the very end with consummate skill. In series
books, readers treat characters as friends and follow those
storylines as ardently as the ones involving murder and mayhem.
Not content to keep things simmering on low boil, Reichs dunks
her protagonist into a pressure cooker, with plenty of turmoil
stirred up by a former lover, a--possibly--current one and, most
significantly for this reader, yet another ghost of life past,
about which I'll say no more here. Trouble on campus also
surfaces for Professor Brennan, with whom we experience one of
the most harrowing moments in the book: a meeting of professors
and department heads (university politics as weapon of mass
destruction). Oh, and we can't forget some brief appearances by
the ex, who is behaving just like, well, an ex.
It might have been my imagination but I believe too that I saw
the s, if you will, of a possible subplot involving Tempe's
daughter, Katy, who's working in the public defender's office.
I'm looking forward to seeing Reich confirm or deny this in the
next installment.
In Devil s we get plenty of what we've come to expect in a
Reichs novel: engrossing details on forensic anthropology and
anatomical science. Her mastery, and love, of those subjects,
which Reichs herself practices (in both Montreal and Charlotte,
by the way), is evident in her writing. We're also treated to
plenty of esoterica about non-mainstream religions and history (I
mean, I live in North Carolina and didn't know Charlotte was
named for a seventeen-year-old German duchess). The author deftly
negotiates that fine line between using such information to
enhance the experience of reading a novel and padding prose. She
gives us what we need to know--to enrich plot, character or
atmosphere--and then gets back to the story.
And speaking of which: As an author writing in the same genre, I
was impressed with Reichs's ability to keep the roller coaster on
track and speeding along, page after page. She's a true master of
cliff hangers--a neglected skill in a field where far too many
lazy authors end chapters with people leaving rooms, falling
a or offering hand-tipping foreshadowings of what's to come.
I call this the question-mark factor and when writing my thriller
I actually tally up the number of scenes that end in a
compelling, unresolved issue that drives the reader forward.
Reichs has question marks enty.
My one complaint: I read the novel in one sitting. But I'm
hoping that while poor Tempe may want a break after everything
that happens to her in Devil s, author Reichs isn't giving
her any rest and is hard at work on number 12.
--Jeffery Deaver