The Bodies Left Behind, a review by Joanna

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The Bodies Left Behind
Jeffery Deaver

368 pages
Gallery Books
Published 2008

Bookshop.org

Genre: Thrillers, Suspense, Crime

The Bodies Left Behind is a relentlessly twisty pursuit adventure story with a clever balance between the heroine and the main antagonist that one doesn’t often find in this genre. I hadn’t read a Deaver for a while, and am now several behind with his Lincoln Rhyme series – this has been on my unread bookcase for eleven years – but this reminded me why he’s one of my favourite thriller writers.

Brynn McKenzie is a Sheriff’s deputy in a remote part of Wisconsin, who has been asked to investigate an interrupted 911 call from a lakeside holiday cabin. Finding the owners shot dead, she rescues their friend, Michelle, the only survivor, and they narrowly escape. Unarmed and with no means to call for help, the two women go on the run through the forest, and must rely on their wits and each other to survive the killers, who are determined to eliminate all witnesses.

Usually when I’m an outlier on reviews, it’s because I was disappointed by a book that everyone else seemed to love – especially when it comes to thrillers, so it’s rather a surprise, but a nice one, how much I enjoyed this one, considering most of the leading reviews on Goodreads panned it. I think I liked it more than most because I particularly admire smart tough resourceful heroines (and heroes!) who manage to stay one step ahead of the bad guys most of the time. If you’ve read any Deaver at all, you’ll recognise the pattern – protagonist is caught, facing almost certain death, cue end of chapter cliffhanger, a jump to a different POV character, then it’s a few pages before we learn how the MC managed to escape. This happens throughout the book, and would get pretty annoying, I suppose, if the tricks weren’t so clever every time.

I don’t usually like too much of a thriller being told from the perspective of the villain, but Hart was such a thoughtful wrong’un that here I didn’t mind at all. I didn’t see any of the twists coming, and while the baddies’ motivations were increasingly far-fetched, and not a lot made sense by the end (especially the final death), I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, it was heading for 5 stars, my first in a while, but I was disappointed by the ending, so 4.5 rounded down it is.