The Goodbye Man by Jeffery Deaver
The Goodbye Man is the second outing for Deaver’s survivalist mystery-solver Colter Shaw, who pays his bills and gets his thrills tracking down missing persons. Well, that’s the idea, although his day job falls away in this non-stop adventure that includes runaway suspects, cults, what looks set to be a long-running treasure hunt, and a dizzying amount of double-crossing.
As you would expect from the king of the plot twist, Deaver keeps the pace fast, but it’s at the expense of depth of characterisation, especially female characters for large portions of the book. It feels a bit like one of those Bond chase scenes that you keep thinking is going to draw to a close, only for the baddies to pop up again using an even more frantic and unlikely form of transport.
The intricate plotting will be enough for fans to rip through on a lazy lockdown afternoon, but there’s not a great deal else going on, despite the potentially interesting subject matter. An exciting but not particularly elegant read.
(HarperCollins, £16.99), buy it here.
The Last Trial by Scott Turow
Like The Goodbye Man, The Last Trial by Scott Turow begins with a possibly fatal experience for one of its leading characters, before switching back
to earlier events. But rather than featuring a protagonist near the beginning of his franchise, in this book Turow’s legendary defence counsel, Sandy Stern, is on his final case, representing long-standing friend and Nobel Prize winner Kiril, who faces prosecution, ruin and prison for faking clinical trial results. It’s less thrilling than it might be: there are times when Turow hovers too close to undergraduate law lecturer, and I’d joined up the dots well ahead of Sandy.
But there’s much more to enjoy than a dash through the plot to the final twist. There’s nuance and ethics in the mix: how family and love motivate and divide, when pursuing justice might result in greater harm than not, and the long-standing relationships across courtroom divides. Turow introduced us to Sandy Stern in Presumed Innocent in 1988, and this farewell letter to the veteran attorney is written with warmth and affection — and an eye to the future, in the shape of granddaughter Pinky.
(Mantle, £20), buy it here.
