Roadside Crosses

This is the first of Jeffery Deaver's many thrillers that I've read, and I must say I wasn't terribly impressed. Part of my disappointment may be that it was part of a series devoted to a particular sleuth, this time Kathryn Dance of the California Bureau of Investigation, so readers familiar with her and the supporting cast may have found some comfort there. But I was hung up on some of my pet peeves in the mystery genre--tedious detail, last-second rescues, and twists for twists' sake.

Roadside Crosses is a chop suey of themes relating to the computer age, including social networking sites, incendiary blogs, and online multiple-player games. Deaver, as if sensing his audience is an older one, takes great pains to explain what it all means, even giving a definition of what a blog is (and an avatar, too). It's as if Deaver, troubled by the problems the Internet has created in modern life, decided to throw it all against the wall and see what stuck.

Essentially, it's the story of a killer who puts up one of those roadside memorials before he attacks someone, which is a nifty idea, but seems tacked on to the larger computer theme. Dance, who investigates, thinks her suspect is a troubled teenager who has been cyber-bullied. She tries to get a local blogger, where all of the bullying has gone on, to disallow continued comments, but he refuses, citing freedom of the press. It's clear Deaver disagrees with this sentiment, as the blogger is presented as something less than exemplary.

As Dance and her team (a large one, I couldn't keep them all straight) look for the teen, the attacks keep coming. Of course only the dimmest reader won't figure out that it might not be the teen after all, and Deaver supplies not one but two twists, each one proving more ludicrous than the last. Somehow Dance figures it all out, which makes even less sense. There's also a subplot involving Dance's mother, a nurse who is arrested for a mercy killing, which is totally superfluous.

What bothered me most about the book was the standard police procedural style of crisp, no-nonsense reportage. Though Deaver doesn't write in a florid style, he does get bogged down in the mundane, such as what people are having to eat or what they are wearing, which makes me think he's getting paid by the word. Dance has appeared in several novels, and he tries to make her interesting by giving her a sideline of being an expert on folk music, but she still comes across as something of a blank slate.

Books about killers who use the Internet can be frightening, see Michael Connelly's Scarecrow, but Roadside Crosses comes across as a cranky old guy complaining about all this new-fangled stuff (I'm reminded of the embarrassing Andy Rooney commentary of last week, in which he was amazed that he didn't know any of the artists on the Billboard 100). Deaver clearly knows his audience, and they must be all over sixty.