Review: Downstate - Jeffery Deaver

Not long ago, I read and enjoyed the first novel by Jeffery Deaver to feature Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations agent Constant Marlowe, THE RULE OF THREES. Amazon calls it a novella, but it’s actually a novel. (Yes, I’m still harping on that.)

Deaver’s second Constant Marlowe novel, DOWNSTATE, is shorter but still the length of, say, an Ace Double. (Probably not too many people who work at Amazon are familiar with Ace Doubles, I’m guessing.) In this one, Marlowe travels to a small, agricultural town in pursuit of an information broker with ties to the mob. But while she’s there, she foils an attempted armed robbery at a convenience store and stumbles into what may be an even more sinister case. It’s a dangerous case, too, but Marlowe, who is smart and tough—a former professional boxer, in fact—is a match for the people who want her dead.

As always in a Deaver novel, there are plot twists galore. In these yarns, seldom is anything what it appears to be at first. If the twists in DOWNSTATE aren’t quite as sharp and clever as they are in most of Deaver’s work—and they’re not—they’re still surprising enough to be entertaining.

It helps that Deaver is a good writer who knows how to keep things moving along at a brisk pace. The criminal schemes in this book reminded me of the sort of things Jack Reacher usually stumbles into, but I much prefer Deaver’s writing. Also, Constant Marlowe is an engaging protagonist, even if she’s not all that likable at times. I hope Deaver continues writing these short novels about her because I’ll certainly continue reading them. For now, this one is available only in e-book and audio editions.

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.

Scheme - Jeffery Deaver

I’ve read only one novel by Jeffery Deaver (THE BONE COLLECTOR), but I’ve read a couple of collections of his short stories and several of the novellas he’s written in recent years. The latest of those novellas is SCHEME, a police procedural in which a detective is on the trail of a domestic terrorist organization planting bombs. The terrorists communicate with each other about where the bombs are to be placed by using a bizarre code involving poems. Which (naturally enough if you’ve read enough stories like this) means that our cop protagonist has to recruit a beautiful female English professor to help him crack the code.

Of course, this being a Jeffery Deaver yarn, nothing is quite what it seems at first glance, and that predictable unpredictability actually works a little against the story’s effectiveness, if you know what I mean. When it's a given that some enormous twist will be coming along later, you start thinking early on about what it might be. And in the case of SCHEME, I’m not sure it really works that well.

Luckily, Deaver has a nice touch with characters and his prose is smooth and enjoyable to read. SCHEME flies by and is entertaining enough, but I wouldn’t rank it near the top of Deaver’s novellas. I’d still rather read something like this than some 600-page doorstop with not nearly enough plot, like you get in some modern thrillers.

Three Novellas by Jeffery Deaver

I've read and enjoyed some of Jeffery Deaver's novels in the past, so when he started writing novellas and publishing them as e-books, I picked up a few and have been reading them. I really like the novella length, both as a writer and a reader. So here are some quick thoughts on three of Deaver's novellas, in the order in which I read them.

CAUSE OF DEATH is about a history professor whose wife dies in a car accident, but he thinks the wreck is suspicious and sets out to find the truth. Deaver is famous for big twists in his stories, and this yarn certainly has one. Trouble is, it's so over-the-top and hard to believe that it just comes off as silly. This one didn't work for me at all. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

TURNING POINT follows a law enforcement task force on the trail of a serial killer. This one is tons better than CAUSE OF DEATH. I figured out the twist, but not until I was well into the novella, and I thought it was very clever and effective. One of the characters is really interesting. This is a good one and I recommend it to mystery fans.

BURIED is about an old-fashioned reporter on the verge of retirement who's after a serial kidnapper who buries his victims alive and torments the authorities with riddles about where to find them. I liked the characters in this one quite a bit. The big twist seemed to be lacking a little, though, like it needed one more sting in the tail. Still, it's a pretty good story and worth reading. Deaver has several more novellas available as e-books, and I'm almost certainly going to read them.