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The Bodies Left Behind (2008)
A spring night in a small town in Wisconsin. . . . A call to police emergency from a distant lake house is cut short. . . . A phone glitch or an aborted report of a crime? Off-duty deputy Brynn leaves her
family's dinner table and drives up to deserted Lake Mondac to find out. She stumbles onto the scene of a heinous murder. . . . Before she can call for backup, though, she finds herself the next
potential victim. Deprived of her phone, weapon and car, Brynn and an unlikely ally – a survivor of the carnage – can survive only by fleeing into the dense, deserted woods, on a desperate trek to safety
and ultimately to the choice to fight back. The professional criminals, also strangers to this hostile setting, must forge a tense alliance too, in order to find and kill the two witnesses to the
crime...
The Bodies Left Behind has been released as a mass market paperback in the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland.
The Bodies Left Behind won the "Best Thriller Of The
Year" award from the International Thriller Writers Organization.
Read an excerpt and an interview with Jeffery Deaver now. Watch The Bodies Left Behind video.
Review:
After stumbling onto a grisly murder, Deputy Brynn McKenzie flees into the Wisconsin woods with killers on her trail. Movie Pitch: Fargo meets The Searchers. Lowdown: The
battle of wits between Brynn and the hitman gets so intimate it's almost romantic. A-
— Entertainment Weekly
The place: A secluded house in a forest in the boonies of Wisconsin during the off-season. The case: A young lawyer working on a sensitive union case and her social worker husband are getting away from it
all for the weekend when two men, faces covered in mesh, burst into the house. The social worker begs: "Look, you can have whatever you want. We've got a Mercedes outside. I'll get the keys."
His pleas do no good, but his one-word 911 call alerts a policewoman. Food pairing: Bratwurst and beer. Brings to mind: An endlessly twisty episode of Law & Order. The verdict: Jeffery Deaver plays
gotcha with readers so many times you begin to anticipate his tricks, but the biggest twist of all, you'll never see coming. Very engrossing story.
— Fort Worth Star-Telegram
What's this? A Jeffery Deaver novel with no mad-dog serial killer and no state-of-the-art technology to track his moves? Pinch me. But THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND is no dream, only a different kind of
nightmare — the elemental one of being hunted down in the wild like an animal. Brynn McKenzie, a sheriff's deputy in rugged Kennesha County, Wis., lands in this trap when she finds a high-powered lawyer
and her social-worker husband shot to death in their isolated vacation house and their terrified guest, a chic city dweller named Michelle, cowering in the woods in her spike-heeled boots. Saddled with
Michelle ("I'm really an actress"), Brynn is at a big disadvantage against two heavily armed hit men, hellbent on eliminating the only witness to the slaughter. Yet the resourceful deputy manages to make
this a dead-even match, winning the creepy admiration of the lead killer. The meticulously structured plot moves back and forth between hunter and hunted, covering a big stretch of wild country. But
although some of the near-miss encounters seem arbitrary, this is still a thrill-a-minute wilderness adventure.
— New York Times
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