Jeffery Deaver

“If gobbling a book in one sitting is any reliable indicator, then “A Maiden’s Grave” was a screaming hit with this bleary-eyed reader.”
– The New York Times Book Review

“Deaver brilliantly conveys the tensions and deceit of hostage negotiations; he also proves a champion of the deaf, offering poetic insight into their world. Throughout, heartbreakingly real characters keep the wildly swerving plot from going off-track, even during the multiple-whammy twists that bring the novel, Deaver’s best to date, to its spectacular finish.”
– Publishers Weekly

“A topnotch thriller with an unexpected kicker at the end.”
– Library Journal

She wanted only to sleep.

The plane had touched down two hours late and there’d been a marathon wait for the luggage. And then the car service had messed up; the limo’d left an hour ago. So now they were waiting in line for a cab.

She stood in the line of passengers, her lean body listing against the weight of her laptop computer. John rattled on about interest rates and new ways of restructuring the deal but all she could think was: Friday night, 10:30. I wanna pull on my sweats and climb into bed.

Gazing at the endless stream of yellow cabs. Something about the color and the similarity of the cars . . . . they reminded her of insects. And she shivered with the creepy-crawly feeling she remembered from her childhood in the mountains when she and her brother’d find a gut-killed badger or kick over a red ant nest and gaze at the wet mass of squirming bodies and legs.

T.J. Colfax shuffled forward as the cab pulled up and squealed to a stop.

The cabbie only popped the trunk and stayed in the cab. They had to load their own luggage, which ticked John off. He was used to people doing things for him. Tammie Jean didn’t care; she was still occasionally surprised to find that she had a secretary to type and file for her. She tossed her suitcase in, slammed the trunk and climbed inside.

John got in after her, slammed the door and mopped his pudgy face and balding scalp as if the effort of pitching his suit bag in the trunk had exhausted him.

“First stop East Seventy Second,” John muttered through the divider.

“Then the Upper West Side,” T.J. added. The plexiglass between the front and back seats was badly scuffed and she could hardly see the driver. She wondered vaguely why he was wearing a stocking cap in this heat. He seemed thin and she wondered if maybe he was a cancer patient.

The cab shot away from the curb and was soon cruising down the expressway toward Manhattan.

“Look, that’s it,” John said. “Why all the crowds.”

He was pointing at a billboard welcoming delegates to the U.N. conference, which was starting on Monday. There were going to be ten thousand visitors in town. T.J. gazed up at the billboard — blacks and whites and Asians, waving and smiling. There was something wrong about the artwork, though. The proportions and the colors were off. And the faces were eerie.

T.J. muttered, “Body Snatchers.”

They sped onto the broad expressway, uneasily yellow under the highway lights. Past the old Navy yard, past the Brooklyn Piers.

John finally stopped talking and pulled out his Texas Instruments. He started crunching some numbers. T.J. sat back in the seat, looking at the steamy sidewalks and sullen faces of people sitting on the brownstones overlooking the highway. They seemed half-comatose in the heat.

It was hot in the cab too and T.J. reached for the button to lower the window. She wasn’t surprised to find that it didn’t work. She reached across John. His was broken too. It was then that she noticed that the door locks were missing.

And the door handles too.

Her hand slid over the door, feeling for the nub of the handle. No, it was as if someone had cut it off with a hacksaw.

“What?” John asked.

“Well, the doors. . . . How do we open them?”

John was looking from one to the other when the sign for the Midtown Tunnel came and went.

“Hey,” John rapped on the divider. “You missed the turn. Where’re you going?”

“Maybe he’s going to take the Queensboro,” T.J. suggested. The bridge meant a longer route but avoided the tunnel’s toll. She sat forward and tapped on the plexiglass, using her ring to make more noise.

“Are you taking the bridge?”

He ignored them.

“Hey!”

And a moment later they sped past the Queensboro turnoff.

“Shit,” John cried. “Where’re you taking us? Harlem. I’ll bet he’s taking us to Harlem.”

T.J. looked out the window. A car was moving parallel to them, passing slowly. She banged on the window hard.

“Help!” she shouted. “Please…”

The driver glanced at her once, then again, frowning. He slowed and pulled behind them but with a hard jolt the cab skidded down at exit ramp into Queens, turned down an alley and sped through a deserted warehouse district. They must’ve been doing sixty miles an hour.”

“What’re you doing?”

T.J. banged on the divider. “Slow down. Where are?—

“Oh, God, no,” John muttered. “Look.”

The driver had pulled the stocking cap down; it was really a ski mask.

“What do you want?” T.J. shouted.

“Money? We’ll give you money.”

Still, silence from the front of the cab.

T.J. ripped open her Targa bag and pulled out her black laptop. She reared back and slammed the corner of the computer into the window. The glass held though the sound of the bang seemed to scare the hell out of the driver. The cab swerved and nearly hit the brick wall of the building they were speeding past.

“Money! How much? I can give you a lot of money!” John sputtered, tears dripping down his fat cheeks.

T.J. rammed the window again with the laptop. The screen flew off under the force of the blow but the window was uncracked.

She tried once more and the body of the computer split open and fell from her hands.

“Oh, shit…”

They both pitched forward violently as the driver skidded to a stop in a dingy, unlit alcove.

The driver climbed out of the cab, a small pistol in his hand.

“Please, no…” she muttered.

 

A breakneck thrill-ride.”
– Wall Street Journal

“Unlike similar crime books, this focus only lightly on the torture scenes and creates tension through satisfying Sherlock Holmes-type detecting and the spunky personalities of the investigators. A fine thriller.”
– Midwest Book Review

“Deaver marries forensic work that would do Patricia Cornwell proud to a turbocharged plot that puts Benzedrine to shame.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“Exciting and fast-paced.”
– Peter Straub

Narrated by Jeff Harding. Listen to an excerpt.

 

When Edward Carney said good-bye to his wife, Percey, he never thought it would be the last time he’d see her.

He climbed into his car, which was parked in a precious space on East Eighty-first Street in Manhattan, and pulled into traffic. Carney, an observant man by nature, noticed a black van parked near the townhouse. A van with mud-flecked, mirrored windows. He glanced at the battered vehicle and recognized the West Virginia plates, realizing he’d seen it on the street several times in the past few days. But then the traffic in front of him sped up. He caught the end of the yellow light and forgot the van completely. He was soon on the FDR expressway, cruising north.

Twenty minutes later he juggled the car phone and called his wife. He was troubled when she didn’t answer. Percey’d been scheduled to make the flight with him — they’d flipped a coin last night for the left-hand seat and she’d won, then given him one of her trademark victory grins. But then she’d wakened at three a.m. with a blinding migraine, which had stayed with her all day. After a few phone calls they’d found a substitute copilot and Percey’d taken a Fiorninal and gone back to bed.

A migraine was the only malady that would ground her.

Lanky Edward Carney, forty-five years old, and still wearing a military hairstyle, cocked his head as he listened to the phone ringing miles away. Their answering machine clicked on and he returned the phone to the cradle, mildly concerned.

He kept the car at exactly sixty miles per hour, centered perfectly in the right lane; like most pilots he was a very conservative driver. He trusted other airmen but thought most drivers were crazy.

In the office of Hudson Air Charters, on the grounds of Mamaroneck Airport in Westchester, a cake awaited. Prim and assembled Sally Anne, smelling like the perfume department at Macy’s, had baked it herself, to commemorate the company’s new contract. Wearing the ugly rhinestone biplane broach her grandchildren had given her last Christmas, she scanned the room to make sure each of the dozen or so employees had a piece of devil’s food sized just right for them. Ed Carney ate a few bites of cake and talked about the flight with Ron Talbot, whose massive belly suggested he loved cake but in fact he survived mostly on cigarettes and coffee. Talbot wore the dual hats of operations and business manager and he worried out loud if the shipment would be on time, if the fuel usage for the flight had been calculated correctly, if they’d priced the job right. Ed handed him the remains of his cake and told him to relax.

He thought again about Percey and stepped away into his office, picked up the phone.

Still no answer at their townhouse.

Now, concern became worry. People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone. He slapped the receiver down, thought about calling a neighbor to check up on her. But then the large white truck pulled up in front of the hanger next to the office and it was time to go to work. Six p.m.

Talbot gave Carey a dozen documents to sign just as young Tim Randolph arrived, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a narrow black tie. Tim referred to himself as a “copilot” and Carney liked that. “First officers” were company people, airline creations, and while Ed respected any man who was competent in the right-hand seat, pretension put him off.

Tall, brunette Lauren, Talbot’s assistant, had worn her lucky dress, whose blue color matching the hue of the Hudson Air logo — a silhouette of an falcon flying over a gridded globe. She leaned close to Carney and whispered, “It’s going to be okay now, won’t it?”

“It’ll be fine,” he assured her. They embraced for a moment. Sally Ann hugged him too and offered him some cake for the flight. He demurred. He wanted to be gone. Away from the sentiment. Away from the festivities.

Away from the ground.

And soon he was: Sailing three miles above the earth, piloting a Lear 35A, the finest private jet ever made, clear of markings or insignia except for its N registration number, polished silver, sleek as a pike.

They flew into a stunning sunset — toward big, rambunctious clouds, pink and purple, leaking bolts of sunlight.

Only dawn was as beautiful. And only thunderstorms more spectacular.

It was 723 miles to O’Hare and they covered that distance in less than two hours. Air Traffic Control’s Chicago Center politely asked them to descend to 14,000 feet, then handed them off to Chicago Approach Control.

Tim made the call. “Chicago Approach. Lear Four Niner Charlie Juliet with you at one four thousand.”

“Evening, Niner Charlie Juliet,” said yet another placid air traffic controller. “Descend and maintain eight thousand. Chicago altimeter thirty point one one. Expect vectors to 27L.”

“Roger, Chicago. Niner Charlie Juliet out of fourteen for eight.”

O’Hare is the busiest airport in the world and ATC put them in a holding pattern way out over the western suburbs of the city, where they’d await their turn to land.

Ten minutes later the pleasant, staticky voice vectored them into the landing pattern.

“Niner Charlie Juliet, heading zero nine zero over the numbers downwind for 27L.”

“Zero nine zero. Niner Charlie Juliet.”

Carney glanced up at the bright points of constellations in the stunning gunmetal sky and he thought, Look, Percey, it’s all the stars of evening . . .

And with that he had what was the only unprofessional urge of perhaps his entire career. His concern for Percey arose like a fever. He needed desperately to speak to her.

“Take the aircraft,” he said to Tim.

“Roger,” the young man responded, hands going immediately and unquestioningly to the yoke.

Air traffic control crackled, “Niner Charlie Juliet, descend to four thousand. Maintain heading.”

“Roger, Chicago,” Tim said. “Niner Charlie Juliet out of eight for four.”

Carney changed the frequency of his radio to make a unicom call. Tim glanced at him. “Calling the company,” Carney explained. When he got Talbot he asked to be patched through the telephone to his home.

As he waited Carney and Tim went through the litany of the pre-landing check.

“Flaps approach. . . . twenty degrees.”

“Twenty, twenty, green.”

“Speed check.”

“One hundred eighty knots.”

As Tim spoke into his mike, “Chicago, Niner Charlie Juliet, crossing the numbers. Through five for four,” Carney heard the phone start to ring in their Manhattan townhouse eight hundred miles away.

Come on, Percey. Pick up! Where are you?

Please. . .

ATC said, “Niner Charlie Juliet, reduce speed to one eight zero. Contact tower now. Good evening.”

“Roger, Chicago. One eight zero knots. Evening.”

Three rings.

Where the hell is she? What’s wrong?

The knot in his gut grew tighter.

The turbofan sang, a grinding sound. Hydraulics moaned. Static crackled in Carney’s headset.

Tim sang out, “Flaps thirty. Gear down.”

“Flaps, thirty, thirty, green. Gear down. Three green.”

And then, at last — in his earphone — a sharp click.

His wife’s voice saying, “Hello?”

He laughed out loud in relief.

Carney started to speak but before he could, the aircraft gave a huge jolt — so vicious that in a fraction of a second the force ripped the bulky headset from his ears, and the men were flung forward into the control panel. Shrapnel and sparks exploded around them.

Stunned, Carney instinctively grabbed the unresponsive yoke with his left hand; he no longer had a right one. He turned toward Tim just as the man’s bloody, rag-doll body disappeared out of the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.

“Oh, God. No, no . . . ”

Then the entire cockpit broke away from the disintegrating plane and rose into the air, leaving the fuselage and wings and engines of the Lear behind, engulfed in ball of gassy fire.

“Oh, Percey,” he whispered, “Percey . . .” Though there was no longer a microphone to speak into.

* * *

“Fair warning to newcomers: Author Deaver is just as cunning and deceptive as his killer; don’t assume he’s run out of tricks until you’ve run out of pages.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“The pace, energized by Deaver’s precise attention, never flags; and if the romantic angle is a little obvious (Rhyme’s seeming concern for one of the Dancer’s female targets sparks Amelia’s jealousy), Deaver manages to renovate many of the hoariest conventions of the ticking-clock-serial-murder subgenre. Another original renovation is his Nero Wolfe-ish Rhyme—a detective who lives the life of the mind by necessity, not choice, and who thinks of everything but can’t even pick up a phone without help. Trust Deaver’s superb plotting and brisk, no-nonsense prose to spin fresh gold from tired straw.”
– Publishers Weekly