Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel [Hardcover]

 

 

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Deaver has several series of novels, and this with Kathryn Dance is the most credible and certainly up to standard.

Reason for Reading: It's almost embarrassing to say but I have never read Jeffery Deaver before. But I have wanted to ever since I saw the movie The Bone Collector a very long time ago, it just seems that with so many thriller writers I'm already reading I just never seemed to get around to reading Deaver so when the chance came to read this one, I jumped.

Comments: Kathryn Dance is the CBI's specialist in kinesics, body language, which makes her a great agent especially when it comes to interviewing suspects and witnesses alike. A cross surrounded by roses is found on the roadside with tomorrow's date written upon it, the trooper who finds it thinks nothing much about it until the next day they find a car parked on the beach which has been there during the coming and going of the tide with a girl locked in the trunk and with her is found a rose petal. More crosses pop up with dates to announce when the next victim will be attacked and each day brings a new victim. A connection comes up between the victims and a teenage boy who is being cyberbullied, especially cruelly on one blog called The Chilton Report. Just when the police find their suspect he disappears and we enter the strange co-existence between the synthetic (online) world and the "real" world through blogging and MMORPGs.

Brilliant. Amazing that an author can carry so many story lines seamlessly and without effort keep the suspense on full tilt all the way through the book. I loved the way the several plot lines run together for more than half the book, then as one get solved there is an about face and the plot rushes in a different direction as the solving of one case only makes it or the others more complex leaving more to be solved. Deaver is very clever, which I'm sure his long time fans already know. But as a first time reader myself, it was exciting to realize this. I was especially tickled with Deaver's deviousness when early in the book I had my eye on a very minor character because of a single word he'd said and through out the book my suspicions about him were deepened with subtle clues until at the end ... well, I won't tell you but I felt like Deaver had created that character for readers like me who often guess the killer in Chapter 2.

I love serial killer books and this one doesn't disappoint. The choices of deaths are imaginative and frightening. It makes for fast reading and long into the night page turning. This book is quite dependant on the first in the series, often speaking of events that previously happened and continuing on with unfinished storylines. Surprisingly, this didn't hamper my reading at all. I easily picked up on what was going on and didn't feel left out though I would highly recommend reading The Sleeping Doll first just as it would be better to be "in the know" to start with before reading this. I intend to go back and read it before book 3 comes out in 2011. But it is because of this heavy reliance on prior events in another book that my rating is a 4 and not otherwise a 5.

The book is also quite interesting in its themes of current internet usage. I've never read a book about blogging before and as a blogger found that the issues dealt with of whether there are any moral and ethical obligations of bloggers who are not answerable to anyone such as mainstream journalist are quite thought-provoking. The book does contain a lot of so-called technical information on blogging, what it is , how it works, which I found very elementary and found myself asking "Are there really people who don't know this stuff?" but later on I found myself realizing that the shoe was on the other foot when the same sort of information was being imparted about MMORPGs, which I didn't even know what it was besides some sort of online game.

Having not read any other books by the author to compare it to, I can't say whether fans will fin it up-to-par or not as someone new to Deaver you will find out what a very, very clever suspense author this man is. Now I know I must go back and catch up on his backlist!

Memorial crosses are being placed along roads on the Monterey Peninsula, and it quickly becomes apparent that the crosses are being placed in advance of the deaths to which they are related. Kathryn Dance and her colleagues from the California Bureau of Investigation are tasked with trying to find out who is placing the crosses, and preventing more deaths from occurring.

Local high school students are interviewed after one of their classmates narrowly escapes death. Kathryn Dance determines, using her skills in kinesic analysis, that the students know something and that they are not sharing all of their information with the police. But other facts are coming to light: on a prominent local blog called `The Chilton Report', the students are talking about Travis Brigham who was driving a car in which two classmates were killed. When Travis takes off, after the police visit him, the police are sure he is their killer.

What follows is an interesting journey through the information and disinformation in the online world. The information that people share on blogs and through other social media, and the alternate realities of those, such as Travis, who prefer the roles they can play online to those they occupy in person.

`The stories were in that blog. They have to be true, don't they?'

It becomes clear that those howling for Travis Brigham's blood are making themselves easy targets for the killer. While Kathryn Dance learns about the dangers of cyberspace (courtesy of Dr Jonathan Boling), her personal life is in turmoil as her mother is charged with the murder of a terminally ill hospital patient.

There are plenty of twists and turns in this story, and while some aspects of the delivery didn't work well for me, I found this an interesting rainy day read. It's a reminder that while danger lurks in both the virtual and actual worlds, the obvious precautions are not always enough.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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