Review: The Rule of Threes - Jeffery Deaver

Amazon calls THE RULE OF THREES by Jeffery Deaver a novella, but hey, where I come from, a book that’s 260 pages long is a novel, and a fairly substantial one, at that. The protagonist, former professional boxer and currently investigator for the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations Constant Marlowe (not Constance, Constant—and there’s a reason for that) was introduced a couple of years ago in a series of actual novellas called THE BROKEN DOLL, which I read but apparently wasn’t impressed enough with to review. But I was in the mood for a thriller and thought THE RULE OF THREES might fill the bill.

Now, I’m not a big fan of current thrillers in general and I don’t much care for serial killer novels, so this one might not have seemed too promising. But Deaver is probably my favorite contemporary thriller author. He writes well, but his prose isn’t as slick and bland as most current authors in the genre, many of whom have no real voice at all. His characters are interesting, and his plots always have some intriguing and surprising twists. All of that is true in THE RULE OF THREES. Two young women have been murdered only days apart and Constant is called in to try to help the local sheriff find the killer before he strikes again. There’s also a land dispute and a Neo-Nazi group in the mix, and it looks like the killer may be targeting potential witnesses to his earlier crimes, adding more innocent targets.

This is, in many senses, a police procedural, and Deaver does a great job following the investigation and keeping things racing along. Then, as I knew would happen, a Big Twist pops up. To say that it comes from left field is an understatement. This one is a long, long throw from the warning track. But if it makes sense and doesn’t strain credibility too far, that’s fine, and for the most part, this one doesn’t.  Some of it requires you to squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right to believe it, but in the end, I did.

I whipped right through THE RULE OF THREES and had a good time reading it. There’s another Constant Marlowe “novella” available called DOWNSTATE, and I already have it on my Kindle. You can get THE RULE OF THREES as an e-book or audio book on Amazon; there’s no print edition although Amazon does say it would be 260 pages long if there was. That makes this a novel as far as I’m concerned, and a pretty darned good one.