The Vanished Man.

The Vanished Man. Jeffrey Deaver. Thriller.
I first got into Jeffrey Deaver's writing when I used the local library in a suburb of Melbourne over Christmas while on a visit to my daughter. With more reading time available than I'd had for some years, and the high cost of books in Australia, it was the only way to viably deal with my very fast reading speed.

I liked immediately his spare style, his tight drawing of characters and locations. And those characters are quirky, too, with little in the superhero department. Makes them people you can relate to.

In The Vanished Man, Deaver's criminal goes on a rampage of graphically horrible serial killings, which very quickly are recognised as reconstructions of classic illusionist tricks.

The police end of things is held up by one Amelia Sachs, detective. She is also lover to the Deaver series criminologist Lincoln Rhyme, who also happens to be wheelchair bound and severely disabled. Nothing wrong with his deductive mind, though.

Through the development of the story, we're also kept first person in the mind of the killer, who doesn't turn out to be the masterful illusionist he believes himself to be. Not least because Sachs and Rhyme are helped along the way by student illusionist Kara, who first recognises the murderous classic set-pieces and then tries to second guess the perpetrator.

The story is fast moving, terse, tricky. And just when the reader is made believe he or she knows it all, finds that nothing is like it seems. That's the trade of the illusionist, after all. In the end, have we reached the end ...?

I've come to like Deaver so much that I had taken two of his books out together from the library here. When I finished The Vanished Man two hours into a very boring small plane trip across Argentina to the Andes in the north west of the country, I was truly sorry that I hadn't brought the second one along with me.

Highly recommended, author and book.

Brian Byrne.