Hunting Time (A Colter Shaw Novel)

I've read all four books in this series and all four are very good. I hope there will be more to come in this series.

Shaw is hired by the owner of a company that makes portable nuclear reactors that he says will be a huge help to many third-world countries that will benefit greatly from the energy they provide. Unfortunately someone from his company has stolen a key secret component and is attempting to sell it. Shaw is hired to find out who stole the component and recover it before it is sold.

Shaw completes that job and the owner talks Shaw into staying on to help locate his best engineer and her daughter who have went on the run to escape her ex-husband who has just been released from jail early after being sentenced to three years for savagely beating her and has now threatened to kill her. Now Shaw must find the two before the ex-husband does. A couple great twists at the end which may surprise you.

So far, this is the best of the Colter Shaw series. An excellent stand-alone story. You don't have to read the previous three books to enjoy this one. It has a twist near the end that the reader doesn't see coming. It will make you flip back to certain scenes to reread and change one's perspective of what is being said and done by the characters. All I can say is WOW.

The concept: Colter is hired by the CEO of a nuclear energy company in the fictional town of Ferrington, a rust belt backwater in an unspecified area of the Midwest. The company manufactures small, portable nuclear power plants that are capable of solving beaucoup infrastructural problems in the third world (and generate megabuck profits in the process). The company’s chief engineer/inventor/brains has an ex-husband who is both a mean, abusive drunk and a former detective. He is being released from prison earlier than expected and has vowed to kill his wife. It is Colter’s job to protect her and her teenage daughter. The wife is also being pursued by two professional hitmen who have been hired by the husband. There is also a local mobster in the picture who has dangerous assets to deploy. To complete the picture there is a Russian operative knocking around who would like to steal (at a bargain basement price) part of the mini- power plant technology. Not to fear, however, since Colter has a sort-of partner from the company—their security officer—who looks like a Scandinavian model but sounds like a southern belle.

The previous sentences should all be liberally qualified with the words ‘putative/putatively’ since this is a Jeffery Deaver novel and we can expect a multitude of twists, turns, reversals and out-of-left-field-but-thoroughly-explained surprises.

Therein lies the problem. Once one has read dozens of JD’s novels (as I have), the author’s hallmark plot device become problematic. How so? The reversals depend on a straight reading of the plot arcs, with the usual suspension of disbelief. You have to surrender to the story in order for the surprises to have their full effect. The problem is that you know the surprises are coming, so it’s impossible to surrender to the story line. Knowing you’re reading JD, your response is to suss out the surprises in advance. That means that it is difficult to develop sympathy for the characters because you always have to keep your options open: that sweet old boy you’re rooting for may well be an SOB (or vice versa). Hence, what should be a crime fiction/noir/suspense/thriller turns into a puzzle story and you’ve turned into a kind of reader of cozies rather than a reader of noir.

All is not lost, because there are other compensations, principally JD’s masterful knowledge of procedural detail. This is reduced here, however, by the fact that we have a fictional setting (something for which, readers should know, I have little patience). JD’s wondrous knowledge of, e.g., NYC soils and substrata, electrical grid, etc. etc. etc. is one of the hallmarks of the Lincoln Rhyme novels. Here, all we know is that we’re in a place with a polluted river and decayed industrial sites (but not Cleveland).

Hence four stars. JD is becoming a master chef known for surprise ingredients, but that alters your reaction to the menu and, ultimately, your response to the food. Inevitably that means the reduction in Michelin stars.

If you like reading the Reacher books, you’ll LOVE the Colter Shaw books. He & Reacher have many similarities & skills, but CS travels the country in style in his fancy truck living in his fancy Airstream trailer hauling his motorcycle. You will always learn a lot about a lot reading these books-things that may or may not ever be helpful (or life saving), & boy are they entertaining, EXTREMELY well written, hard to put down & now are my FAVORITE series. This book was my 66th this year & was my favorite of all of them.