The One I Left Behind

 

 

The first thing she does when she wakes up is check her hands. She doesn't know how long she's been out. Hours? Days? She's on her back, blindfolded, arms up above her head like a diver, bound to metal pipe. Her hands are duct taped together at the wrist--but they're both still there.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Jesus, sweet, sweet Mother Mary, both her hands are there. She wiggles her fingers and remembers a song her mother used to sing:

Where is Thumpkin? Where is Thumbkin?

Here I am, Here I am,

How are you today, sir?

Very well, I thank you,

Run away, Run away.

The One I Left Behind

Jennifer McMahon

 

Another quick read; well-written. Jennifer McMahon has an extensive backlist--some I've already read and more to anticipate.

 

A serial killer. Suspense. A bit of a psychological thriller.

 

 

Identical

 

Many years from now, whenever he thinks back to Dita Kronon’s murder, Paul Gianis’s memories will always return to the start of the day. It is September 5, 1982, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, a lush afternoon with high clouds lustrous as pearls. Zeus Kronon, Dita’s father, has opened the sloping grounds of his suburban mansion to hundreds of his fellow parishioners from St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in the city for their annual celebration of the ecclesiastical New Year. Down the hill, in the grassy riverside meadow that serves as a parking lot, Paul arrives with his mother and his identical twin brother, Cass. The next few hours with both of them, Paul knows, will be an ordeal.

Identical

Scott Turow

-source-

State Senator Paul Giannis is a candidate for Mayor of Kindle County. His identical twin brother Cass is newly released from prison, 25 years after pleading guilty to the murder of his girlfriend, Dita Kronon. When Evon Miller, an ex-FBI agent who is the head of security for the Kronon family business, and private investigator Tim Brodie begin a re-investigation of Dita's death, a complex web of murder, sex, and betrayal-as only Scott Turow could weave-dramatically unfolds... - See more at: http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/scottturow/identical.html#sthash.AjYaORwH.dpuf

I LOVE this book. Twists and turns; anticipation. Great storytelling. I really couldn't put it down. I always like Scott Turow's books, and this one I like the best, so far. Legal thriller; procedural, but different.

Many of the characters are a bit fuzzy, especially Paul and Cass--for very good reasons. These folks all seem to live lives a bit blurred on-the-surface. Evon and Tim we get to see clearly. There are really no legal villans here, just a couple of buffoons.

It's not the criminal justice system that's crooked here, it's mostly everyone else.

I've already recommended this book a few time.

 

Edge

The man who wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove trough a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields this humid morning.


A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.


* * *


When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is a smuch bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.


But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other. I frequently told this to my protege and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept saying it because you can't forget, ever. It's a business with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.
Edge
Jeffrey Deaver

This is a riveting read. Truly. I loved it. Many, many twists and a few switch-backs. It's that curvey. Still, it held my attention and I sped through it in under 24 hours. Sometimes I just have to. And, I had the time yesterday.

THE LAST GOOD DAY

It was early on one of those powder-blue late-September mornings when middle-aged commuters stand on platforms, watching airplanes pass before the sun and hoping the apex of some great arc in their lives hasn't already been reached.


On the far side of the Hudson from the train station, the Rockland County palisades glinted as if they'd been freshly chopped by God's own cleaver. From the rustling trees along the shoreline came the same sound of money in the wind that the old Dutch trades must have heard when they first rounded this little bend in the river.


The water was brownish and turbulent, as if a low flame were on underneath it. Out by the narrowing of the channel, a forty-five-foot cabin cruiser skimmed across the surface, leaving a broad foamy cape. The ripples spread, pushing the cattails and the submerged bluish-gray mass closer to the crooked-in elbow of land beside Riverside Station.


"Hey, what is that thing?" said Barry Shulman, standing at the platform railing.
The Last Good Day
Peter Blauner

I ran onto Peter Blauner as one of the writers in Nelson DeMille's Mystery Writers of America Presents The Rich and the Dead. I made a list of most of the authors and this one by Peter Blauner is the first I've read from that list.

Excellent book. I was captivate from the first. More suspense than mystery, but that's only good. I'll read more from Blauner's backlist.

LAND OF THE LIVING

Darkness. Darkness for a long time. Open my eyes and close, open and close. The same. Darkness inside, darkness outside.

I'd been dreaming. Tossed around in a black dark sea. Staked out on a mountain in the night. An animal I couldn't see sniffed and snuffled around me. I felt a wet nose on my skin. When you know you're dreaming you wake up. Sometimes you wake into another dream. But when you wake and noting changes, that must be reality.
Land of the Living
Nicci French

From the website:
Abbie Devereaux wakes in the dark, hooded and bound...


She doesn't know where she is nor who it is feeding her, talking to her - threatening to kill her. Yet Abbie has courage and, above all, hope. She escapes her captor and runs back into the light. But the real world, the safe one, isn't as she remembers it. There are days missing before she disappeared - days when she quit her job and left her boyfriend, did things she can't explain to the police, her friends or even herself. Why won't anyone take her story seriously? Because if Abbie can't convince anybody that it really happened, then maybe he will come for her again. And she will wake in the dark, hooded and bound...

I've read this before. It was published in 2003, so that's when I probably read it. It's a compelling read and I'm enjoying it again. Will follow-up this one with her their newer books. Yep, I just discovered on their website that Nicci French = a married couple: Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Didn't know that before.