![]() But when the woman opens the door, expecting to see the girl’s rescuers, the visitor turns out to be the kidnapper - and he has a gun. Here’s the ending (which comes, of course, at the beginning), every word of it true: It’s 6:30 on a Sunday night and a woman and a man she trusts are alone in a Manhattan apartment anxiously awaiting news of her kidnapped 6-year-old daughter. ![]() The reader is never lied to in Deaver’s brilliant shell game, merely misdirected, and the best part of this trick is that despite being in on the game, we continue to make false assumptions. Let’s admit that the prose is a bit flat, and the characters lack nuance, the unavoidable consequence of withholding key information about persons and motives until those last (first!) five chapters give it all up. ![]() ![]() Taking inspiration from Kierkegaard (“Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward”), the devious author begins his story with Chapter 36 and methodically works his way back to Chapter 1. ![]() The temptation to read THE OCTOBER LIST (Grand Central, $26) backward - which is to say, forward - must be resisted, or you’ll hate yourself for spoiling what might well be Jeffery Deaver’s most fiendish thriller ever. ![]()
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