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Summary
Summary
INCLUDES A BONUS MP3 CD OF JEFFERY DEAVER'S THE BLUE NOWHERE !
The latest Kathryn Dance thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sleeping Doll !
The Monterey Peninsula is rocked when a killer begins to leave roadside crosses beside local highways -- not in memoriam, but as announcements of his intention to kill. And to kill in particularly horrific and efficient ways: using the personal details about the victims that they've carelessly posted in blogs and on social networking websites.
The case lands on the desk of Kathryn Dance, the California Bureau of Investigations foremost body language expert. She and Deputy Michael O'Neil follow the leads to Travis Brigham, a troubled teenager whose role in a fatal car accident has inspired vicious attacks against him on a popular blog, The Chilton Report. As the investigation progresses, Travis vanishes. Using techniques he learned as a brilliant participant in multiplayer online role-playing games, he easily eludes his pursuers and continues to track his victims. Among the obstacles Kathryn must hurdle are politicians from Sacramento, paranoid parents and the blogger himself, James Chilton, whose belief in the importance of blogging and the new media threatens to derail the case and potentially Dance's career. It is this threat that causes Dance to take desperate and risky measures...
In signature Jeffery Deaver style, Roadside Crosses is filled with dozens of plot twists, cliff-hangers and heartrending personal subplots. It is also a searing look at the accountability of blogging and life in the online world. Roadside Crosses is the third in Deaver's bestselling High-Tech Thriller Trilogy, along with The Blue Nowhere and The Broken Window .
Author Notes
Jeffery Deaver was born on May 6, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University. Before attending law school, he worked as a business writer. After law school, he worked for a Wall Street law firm practicing corporate law. In 1990, he decided to stop practicing law and become a full-time writer.
His first novel was a horror story entitled Voodoo. He is the author of more than 25 novels and has written some of those stories under the pseudonym William Jeffries. He writes the Lincoln Rhyme series and the Kathryn Dance series. A Maiden's Grave was adapted into a film by HBO called Dead Silence and The Bone Collector was adapted into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He received the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association, the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year three times, and the British Thumping Good Read Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tony Award-winning actress Michele Pawk nicely captures the inner monologues of Deaver's protagonist Kathryn Dance, the California Bureau of Investigation's leading kinesics expert. Dance's remarkable sixth sense concerning the truthfulness of suspects and witnesses becomes a double-edged sword in her social interactions with co-workers and family members, and Pawk's portrayal of the widowed detective's angst on the fledgling romantic front rings especially true. Pawk's rendering of the dialogue proves to be her weak point: the voices of older teen boys, especially Travis Brigham, the young man at the center of the story, continually quiver into higher octaves more suitable to preadolescent males. While the listener never loses touch with the essence of Dance, others in her path come to life with varying degrees of success. A Simon & Schuster hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 13). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
Of all the beasts on the prowl, none is more unnerving than a disaffected teenage boy with a grudge and a gun. Leaving to others the in-depth psychological analysis of such youthful spree killers, Jeffery Deaver turns his attention in ROADSIDE CROSSES (Simon & Schuster, $26.95) to the social triggers that set them off. Someone on the scenic Monterey Peninsula is putting up highway memorials to victims of violent attacks that have yet to happen, and it falls to Kathryn Dance and her colleagues in the California Bureau of Investigation to solve this morbid mystery. Applying her expertise in kinesic analysis in interviews with local high school students, Dance determines from their body language that they're lying about something. The kids are more forthcoming when they go on The Chilton Report, a blog where everyone is flaming Travis Brigham, the "total fr33k" and "luser" who was driving the car in which two classmates were killed in a recent highway accident. When Travis takes off on his bike, the police are sure they have their killer. Surprisingly, clever Kathryn is a virgin when it comes to the blogosphere, and an attractive computer scientist, Dr. Jonathan Boling, must be imported from academia to initiate her into this arcane world. And a very good job he does of it, too, patiently instructing her in the language and logistics of social networking and the cruel Internet taunts that can unhinge an unstable personality. When it becomes apparent that the cyberbullies howling for Travis's blood are making themselves easy targets for the killer, Dance is reminded of Boling's words: "We give away too much information about ourselves online. Way too much." Once he dissects the journalistic ethics of messianic bloggers like the self-righteous moralizer behind The Chilton Report, Deaver moves on to alternative-reality Web sites like DimensionQuest, the violent role-playing game to which Travis is addicted. When Boling warns Dance that Travis "could be losing the distinction between the synthetic world and the real world," the author is drawing on real-life phenomena like the computer gaming centers and total-immersion pods that are turning players into bots. But the techno-savvy Deaver is too much the master gamesman to scold anyone else for a little excessive play, and in some brilliant plot maneuvers he counters every warning about warrior bloggers and glassy-eyed gamers with well-reasoned arguments in their defense - and real doubts about their proclivity to commit murder. Like his best players, he has one of those puzzle-loving minds you just can't trust. It's the scenery - and the big guy standing in front of the scenery - that keeps us coming back to Craig Johnson's lean and leathery mysteries. All the books in this series are set in Wyoming and feature Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County, who's a good man to have on your side if you're a world-class rider jailed for shooting your husband after he burned down the stable with your horses inside. That's what happens in THE DARK HORSE (Viking, $24.95) to Mary Barsad, who refuses to talk about the bloodbath, leaving the sheriff to investigate in his own maverick style. Working undercover, Walt meets some crusty characters in a bar where beer is served only in cans ("Nobody ever got hurt throwing a can, and nobody in this part of the world ever threw a full one") and a Powder River PoundDown Tough-Man Contest is held every Friday night. Walt takes a few punches when he's roped into one of these fights, but that gets him a wild ride on a magnificent horse. And in the end, in one of those surprising grace notes that keep this series from falling into cowboy guff, it's the song of a meadowlark that gives the killer away. The bold narrator and chilling historical setting of A TRACE OF SMOKE (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.95) can get you past the clunky writing in Rebecca Cantrell's first mystery. Set in Berlin in 1931, the sordid story is narrated by Hannah Vogel, a crime reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt. The crime she's secretly investigating hits close to home: the murder of her kid brother, a cabaret singer who was perhaps too flagrant a homosexual for the city's political climate. "This is no game," his older lover warns her. "There are real consequences for us all." After answering him in the same clichéd dialogue, Hannah ignores his advice and makes an enemy of Ernst Röhm, the brutal head of Hitler's brownshirts. Without much deviation from the woman-in-peril formula, Cantrell puts it in an unusually vivid context, letting Hannah report on the decadence of her world without losing her life - or her mind. With so many exhibitionist forensic experts showing off their extraordinary skills, it's a rare pleasure to sit down to a traditional detective story in which solid police work solves a crime. Inspector Hal Challis is very much in charge of the operations in an excellent Australian series written by Garry Disher. But as BLOOD MOON (Soho, $24) illustrates, it's smoothly coordinated teamwork that brings down the murderer of an agent of the Waterloo land use commission, a caring woman who shared Challis's alarm over the rampant real-estate development of the Mornington Peninsula and the nouveaux riches who demand it. There are no shootouts here. Just the drama of people from very different social classes locked in battle over the schools, the services, the beaches, the views and a way of life that has already gone behind a cloud. 'We give away too much information about ourselves online,' Deaver's heroine learns. 'Way too much.'