EDGE by Jeffrey Deaver

Book Quote:

“The hitter was now reaching in to unlatch my door. I squinted in pain, grateful for the man’s delay. It meant that Alissa could gain more distance. My people would know our exact position through GPS and could have police here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Please, I thought, turning toward the path she’d be escaping down, the shallow creekbed.

Except that she wasn’t running anywhere.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (NOV 27, 2010)

Action-suspense master Deaver’s latest nail-biter pits the narrator, Corte, a government protection expert, known as a “shepherd,” against a ruthless “lifter,” Henry Loving, whose job is to grab the target – a DC cop – and extract information from him by any means possible, meaning torture, as we’ve already seen in a grisly prologue.

What this information is and who wants it are two of the questions Corte is trying to answer as he shepherds the cop, Ryan Kessler, and his wife and sister-in-law from one not-quite-safe house to another, setting traps and dodging bullets as they go.

Deaver fans get the non-stop pace we expect as the characters unfold in increments, raising more questions with every quirk and revelation. Corte, whose passion is board games and game theory, prides himself on humorless ingenuity and – if it weren’t for the lives at stake – would thoroughly enjoy pitting himself against a well-matched opponent like Loving.

The twists, reversals and double reversals keep the pace breakneck, while complicating the mix with various intelligence agencies and cops and, of course, the heavy hand of bureaucracy. Corte slowly reveals himself as not quite the automaton he tries to appear, and readers will hope to see more of him.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (November 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jeffrey Deaver
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Burning Wire The Broken Window The Vanished Man The Stone Monkey