This is the description of the story from Deaver’s official website:
A school bus carrying eight deaf school-girls and their teachers brakes suddenly on a flat Kansas highway. They should never have stopped. Waiting for them are three heartless men just escaped from prison — each with nothing to lose. And now, with the girls as their hostages, they have everything to gain. They make their stand in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and it is there that Lou Handy, a murderer and the convicts’ ringleader, announces his terms: to kill one captive an hour unless his demands are met.
What follows is a twelve-hour siege of noose-tight tension — and a war of nerves between Handy and the FBI’s senior hostage negotiator, Arthur Potter.
As I was absolutely amazed by the first book I read from this author – The Coffin Dancer (You can find my review of the book here), I started to search other books from him and found this one. It is even older book than the previous one as this was written in 1995.
From my point of view, the book was not as good as the Coffin Dancer even though there was nothing particular wrong. It has fast and exciting beginning but after some time it just looses the fast pace. I really like how the author is able to describe the scene and also the feelings and emotions of each character and it was interesting for me how Potter was explaining the psychology behind each decision he made.
At the end, there was again big twist in the plot, however, in this case I was kind of expecting it. With my experience from the previous book, when the case seemed to be solved but there were still quite a few pages left in the book, I was just expecting that something wasn’t as it seemed. I was even partly expecting who would make the twist, just didn’t expect how and that made me happy. I hate it when I solve the case before I finish the book (or movie).
So, to sum this up, the book is great, exciting and definitely full of interesting details about how the police negotiators work and how deaf people solve their usual (and very unusual) situations. It is also full of intrigues, speculations and unexpected situations. I am also getting a feeling that this author likes to add romantic or sexual emotions to his stories.
My rating of this book is 8/10.
Pinky Kidney 