"Edge," by Jeffery Deaver

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This is the second of the two books recently loaned me by Bill.  I happened to bump into him the other day, and he told me that he didn't finish reading it.  I got on a bit better with it than Bill did, although I wouldn't say that it is one of my favourite books by Jeffery Deaver.

The book centres on a world that I know little about and have read little fiction about - that of the protection officer.  Corte, the officer in question, is assigned to protect the Kessler family following intercepted information that a "lifter" (someone who is assigned to use whatever means necessary to obtain information) has been hired to target them.  This is also an important case for Corte as the lifter in question, Henry Loving, had tortured and killed his mentor.  Loving had been thought dead, and the discovery that this was a ruse re-awakens Corte's desire to get Loving.

This novel is essentially a protracted game of cat and mouse between Corte and Loving, with an element of mystery provided by the uncertainty of which member of the Kessler family is the target and why.  There are lots of twists in the narrative, as would be expected in a Deaver novel, and the figure of Corte as a narrator is occasionally unreliable.  There was one twist which I saw coming from way off, and found myself getting frustrated that Corte was taking so long to get there - but that turned out to be one of a few false leads in the plot.  I did find the ending rather unsatisfying, however, and felt that a couple of the red herrings would have been a more interesting resolution to the narrative than the one that Deaver chose to go with.

That's not to say that there weren't elements in the story that I liked.  I still think that Deaver is very good at constructing a thriller that wants you to keep reading and, despite my caveat in the paragraph above, I felt compelled to read on and find out what was coming next.  In addition to this, I liked the character of Corte and was kept reading by that as much as, maybe even more than, I was by the machinations of the narrative itself.  It's an entertaining read, but not one that I loved so much that I can see myself wanting to re-read it in the future as I would one of Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series...