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HUNTING TIME

by Jeffery Deaver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2022

Deaver lite: a fleet, irresistible tale with just enough twists to have been imagined by someone else.

After the reward money, as always, security consultant Colter Shaw searches for a missing person several other less scrupulous people are searching for, too.

The Midwestern startup Harmon Energy Products has worked feverishly to develop Pocket Sun, a room-sized nuclear reactor that holds serious promise for supplying African states’ energy needs. Its biggest innovation, founder Marty Harmon tells Shaw, is the security intervention trigger developed by engineer Allison Parker, a device that renders the reactor inoperable if it’s stolen. When an S.I.T. is itself stolen by an insider planning to sell it to one of Harmon’s competitors, Shaw promptly identifies the thief, earning a shot at a much bigger reward if he can find Allison Parker, who’s taken off with her daughter, teenage math prodigy Hannah, in response to the news that her ex-husband, former Ferrington Police Det. Jon Merritt, has been released from prison early. Allison’s testimony had put Merritt away for three years for assaulting and attempting to kill her. Now, hours after lawyer David Stein warns her that Merritt has been released after only a year, she and the vocally reluctant Hannah have taken a powder, and Merritt has grabbed Stein for information about where they might have gone. The complication is that Shaw and Merritt aren’t the only people looking for Allison; a crew of mobbed-up killers are on her trail as well. Remarkably for the reliably inventive author, that really is the main complication; the converging searches proceed along relatively predictable lines, though Deaver wouldn’t be Deaver if he didn’t have cannily timed surprises to detonate along the way.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-42208-3

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jeffery Deaver & Isabella Maldonado

by Jeffery Deaver

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THE GOD OF THE WOODS

by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in  Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

More by Liz Moore

by Liz Moore

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, hunting time: a colter shaw novel.

Jeffery Deaver has been thrilling readers for over three decades. HUNTING TIME, the fourth installment in his series starring self-proclaimed reward seeker Colter Shaw, proves that he is still at the top of his game.

Marty Harmon, an eccentric entrepreneur, hires Colter to find Allison Parker, one of his most effective engineers. Allison and her often obstinate teenage daughter, Hannah, are on the run after learning that her dangerous ex-husband, Jon Merritt, has just been released from prison. This is far earlier than Allison expected, especially since he was put away for nearly killing her. Merritt was a police detective with a lot of local juice and underworld contacts at his fingertips, so she knows that it will be nearly impossible to evade him for long.

"The last third of HUNTING TIME is run at breakneck speed, and the finale only seals the deal on Colter’s legacy as more than just a mere chaser of rewards."

Colter finds himself teamed with a very able woman, Sonja Nilsson, who is the head of security for Harmon Energy. First, though, he must shake himself free from Lemerov, a Russian operative who works under the code name Abe Lincoln. Only then is he allowed to work with Sonja on locating Allison and Hannah. This will be no simple task as Allison is not only a desperate, abused female, but also more than capable with her engineering skill set of remaining hidden if necessary.

Little do Colter and Sonja know at first that another duo is in pursuit of their targets --- Moll and Desmond, hired thugs who have a special reputation for making bodies disappear forever. When Moll and Desmond learn about their adversaries, they plan to take out Colter once they have gotten their mitts on the mother-daughter pair. The hunt is on, and readers will find themselves rooting for Allison, even though she and Hannah do not see eye to eye. There are some hard feelings, not to mention potential explosive information about Merritt, that constantly divide them.

Colter gets to Allison first (just barely), and then the novel turns into a fight for survival against the other set of hunters, which is by far the most suspenseful part of the book. The bottom line is that Colter Shaw is an extremely likable and enigmatic character, and one of Deaver’s best protagonists. The last third of HUNTING TIME is run at breakneck speed, and the finale only seals the deal on Colter’s legacy as more than just a mere chaser of rewards.

Reviewed by Ray Palen on November 23, 2022

Hunting Time: A Colter Shaw Novel by Jeffery Deaver

• Publication Date: November 28, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Mass Market Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• ISBN-10: 0593422104
• ISBN-13: 9780593422106

Join the Mailing List to receive advance information about Jeff’s new books and signings. Join now and you will be able to read “Fear,” an original essay/short story by Jeff about fear in writing suspense.

No. 1 International Bestselling Author

Jeffery deaver, main navigation, search site, uncategorized, rave reviews for hunting time, by jane davis.

“A fleet, irresistible tale” — Kirkus Reviews

“Deaver pulls the rug out from under your feet so often you’ll be sending him your chiropractor bills.” — Daily Express (UK)

“a masterful adventure” — New York Journal Of Books

“ Hunting Time proves to be a suspenseful and relentless thriller that (literally) writes its own rules. Not to be missed.” —BookTrib

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Book Review

Hunting Time

Jeffery deaver.

reviewed by Pam Guynn

Hunting Time by Jeffery Deaver brings plenty of suspense and action to the fourth book in the Colter Shaw crime thriller series. Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah. Shaw has been hired by Allison’s boss, Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Allison is being pursued by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt, who recently was released from prison.

However, he’s not the only one pursuing Allison and Hannah. There are also two thugs who are hitmen and experienced at making bodies disappear forever on her trail. Colter’s efforts are helped by Sonja Nilsson, Harmon’s head of security. The setting starts in the fictional town of Ferrington, somewhere in the Midwest south of Chicago.

Shaw found the law profession stimulating, but a poor fit for his restlessness. Instead, he now runs a rewards business, where he usually only accepts payment if he delivers what is requested such as finding a missing person. However, he does occasionally take a for-hire job. Allison is self-reliant, tough, blunt, perceptive, and smart and travels in a recreational vehicle from job to job. Allison is a brilliant engineer, creative, systematic, efficient, and goal-oriented. Hannah came across as a typical teenager, somewhat moody and argumentative, but lacked adequate communication from Allison to fully understand the dire situation they were in.

The plot has plenty of twists and turns, but is unbelievable at times. However, they kept my interest despite Shaw making some mistakes that I would not have expected him to make. Although the book never specifies which state the story is set in, the novel has great world-building, whether it is the old industrial town of Ferrington or the lake and woods countryside north of it. The tension, stakes, and action build up to an exciting ending that is over-the-top and a shock, but somewhat satisfying. His ability to combine strong characters and complex plots with excellent pacing kept me fully engaged. Themes include domestic violence, family, work family, water pollution, lack of funding for police, corruption, murder, friendship, attempted murder, a possible romance, and much more. This novel also does a nice job of setting up the next book in the series.

Overall, this was well-written, captivating, engaging, and thought-provoking. I enjoyed unraveling the mysteries. I was hooked immediately in the first chapter and the pages kept turning. I recommend this book to those that enjoy crime thrillers. This is the fourth book I’ve read by this author, but the first in this series. I’m looking forward to reading the next one as well as the previous books in the series.

I purchased a copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. Publication date was November 22, 2022.

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Quick Review – Hunting Time by Jeffery Deaver

Publisher: Harper Collins (Trade Paperback – 22 November 2022)

Series: Colter Shaw – Book Four

Length: 419 pages

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Amazon       Book   Depository

In the mood for a twisty and clever thriller guaranteed to leave you highly entertained?  Then you should check out the recent release from best-selling author Jeffery Deaver, Hunting Time .

Due to starting on the genre a little later in life, I currently have a major backlog of famous crime fiction authors that I need to try to check out.  One of these writers was Jeffery Deaver, who has made a major name for himself over the years with books in his Lincoln Rhyme (which includes The Bone Collector ), Kathryn Dance and John Pellman series, as well as several stand-alone novels.  His current series is the Colter Shaw novels, which follow unique private contractor and former survivalist Colter Shaw as he gets involved in a series of intriguing crimes.  Hunting Time is the fourth book in the series and features a compelling plot that really grabbed my attention when I first saw it.

Plot Synopsis:

  THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SURVIVAL. #1: NEVER BE WITHOUT A MEANS OF ESCAPE. Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons–even those who don’t wish to be found–Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection.

#2: NEVER BE WITHOUT ACCESS TO A WEAPON. The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels–an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning.

SHAW IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER RULE #3: NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING. As Shaw ventures further into the wilderness, the truth becomes as hard to decipher as the forest’s unmarked trails…and peril awaits at every turn.

This was an awesome and addictive read from Deaver and it is one that I had a wonderful time reading.  Deaver has come up with a very clever crime fiction story for Hunting Time and I swiftly got drawn into the multi-layered story of hunters and prey.  Told from the perspective of multiple characters involved in the case, you end up getting quite attached to the story as you see Allison flee from her former-cop husband, Jon, while Colter Shaw and other interested parties join the hunt.  I loved the elaborate chase that ensued for much of the book, and you find yourself getting drawn to many of the new characters, especially as Deaver adds in some quick, but comprehensive, character background and history.  While I was enjoying the story, I did think it was a bit one-note for most of the book as it seemed a simple revenge story that the protagonist was intervening in, although the various moves and countermoves of the participants was a lot of fun.  However, it turns out that this was intentional by Deaver as he was building up to a pretty good twist towards the end of the book, one that I did not fully see coming.  This big twist really changed the entire tone and structure of the story and you realise that Deaver set up this twist perfectly and allowed the reader’s assumptions to do the rest.  This twist not only proved to be surprising and memorable, but it also completely changed everything that you knew about the main characters allowing you to see them in a whole new light.  This ended up being a fantastically set out narrative and I was really impressed with the exciting and elaborate story that unfolded.

While I did have a wonderful time with the story, especially thanks to that twist, I did think that other parts of Deaver’s writing let Hunting Time down and impacted my overall enjoyment of the book.  In particular, there was something off with the dialogue and character interactions featured within the book and which really threw me at times.  Some of the dialogue in this book honestly didn’t resemble a normal or natural conversation between people, which often took me out of moment, derailing the pace and my attachment to the story.  I also had a hard time connecting with the protagonist, Colter Shaw, possibly because I haven’t read any of the previous books in the series.  While Deaver does reintroduce key parts of his backstory throughout Hunting Time , often to show how he developed his tracking skills, I found him to be a simplistic character, and his constant calculations of the odds and failed attempts to explain his business model were honestly irritating at times.  That being said, Deaver did ensure that Hunting Time re-captured the main elements of the character, which allows for this book can easily be read as a standalone novel without any need to dive into the previous Colter Shaw books, which was a big help for a new reader like me.

I did feel that several of the other characters introduced in Hunting Time made up for the lack of a well-written central protagonist, especially when it came to husband-and-wife Jon Merritt and Allison Parker.  Deaver painted a powerful picture around this couple, which included abuse, alcoholism and trauma, and the complex backstory he builds around them becomes a key part of the book.  This character backstory becomes more and more relevant as the story continues, and the true revelation of their past comes back to haunt them in ways they never realised.  Throw in a couple of entertaining hitmen, whose unique personalities also contain clues to one of the book’s big twists, and I ended up having a great time seeing how this story unfolded, even with some of the writing issues I mentioned before.

Overall, Hunting Time was a pretty fun book and it served as a good introduction to Jeffery Deaver for me.  The story itself is very well set out, and I am still really impressed with how Deaver was able twist everything around and keep me in suspense.  While I did notice a few technical issues, Deaver’s great storytelling and fantastic supporting characters ended up outweighing the bad and this came away as a very strong read in my opinion.  I will have to try and grab more of Deaver’s books in the future, especially if the next Colter Shaw novel sounds as fantastic as Hunting Time did.

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• Hunting Time

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE UPCOMING CBS ORIGINAL SERIES TRACKER

In  New York Times bestselling master of suspense Jeffery Deaver's riveting thriller, reward seeker Colter Shaw plunges into the woods and races the clock in a case where nothing is quite what it seems.

Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons—even those who don’t wish to be found—Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection.

The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels—an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning.

As Shaw ventures further into the wilderness, the truth becomes as hard to decipher as the forest’s unmarked trails...and peril awaits at every turn.

• Colter Shaw

Colter Shaw consists of four books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.

• Risingshadow
• Jeffery Deaver

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Hunting Time: A gripping new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Final Twist: Book 4 (Colter Shaw Thriller) Hardcover – 24 Nov. 2022

The  New York Times  Bestselling master of suspense is back with a riveting thriller, as reward seeker Colter Shaw plunges into the woods and races the clock in a case where nothing is quite what it seems.

The Times Book of the Month (November 2022)

THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SURVIVAL. #1: NEVER BE WITHOUT A MEANS OF ESCAPE. Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons―even those who don’t wish to be found―Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection. #2: NEVER BE WITHOUT ACCESS TO A WEAPON. The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels―an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning. SHAW IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER RULE #3: NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING. As Shaw ventures further into the wilderness, the truth becomes as hard to decipher as the forest’s unmarked trails…and peril awaits at every turn.

Jeffery Deaver's book 'The Final Twist' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 04-10-2021.

• Book 4 of 4 Colter Shaw
• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperCollins
• Publication date 24 Nov. 2022
• Dimensions 15.9 x 3.8 x 24 cm
• ISBN-10 0008503818
• ISBN-13 978-0008503819
• See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

“The alternating friction and affection between parent and child make Hunting Time especially convincing and nerve-wracking. Mr. Deaver is well-known for maintaining suspense while also subverting readers’ expectations . This fourth Shaw novel―full of “oh no!” surprises and tire-screeching escapes ―is guaranteed to make your heart pound, your blood race and your head spin . And how likely is it that you’re being set up for a finale that will pull the rug out from under you? One hundred percent.” Financial Times

“Hunting Time has got what distinguishes good page-turners from landfill: grip … a neat twist, a deadly chase, plus a pair of killers … and you’re good to go.’ The Times Book of the Month

‘Colter Shaw is one of Deaver's most intriguing characters, a survival specialist who finds people who don't want to be found, for high financial rewards. He is resourceful, smart and courageous … Deaver's plot skills shine out of this tale of treachery and redemption.’ Daily Mail

‘The twists in the plot and relationships are unexpected’ Literary Review

Book Description

A gripping new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Final Twist

About the Author

Jeffery Deaver is the No.1 international bestselling author of more than forty novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins (24 Nov. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008503818
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008503819
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.9 x 3.8 x 24 cm
• 3,563 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
• 11,530 in Police Procedurals (Books)
• 20,350 in Adventure Stories & Action

About the author

Jeffery deaver.

Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into over twenty-five languages. He has served two terms as president of Mystery Writers of America, and was recently named a Grand Master of MWA, whose ranks include Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Mary Higgins Clark and Walter Mosely.

The author of over forty novels, three collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, he’s received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards. His "The Bodies Left Behind" was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller "The Broken Window" and a stand-alone, "Edge," were also nominated for that prize. "The Garden of Beasts" won the Steel Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in England. He’s also been nominated for eight Edgar Awards by the MWA.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Strand Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy.

His book "A Maiden’s Grave" was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel "The Bone Collector" was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Lifetime aired an adaptation of his "The Devil’s Teardrop." NBC television recently aired the nine-episode prime-time series, "Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector."

You can find out more about Jeffery on his website www.jefferydeaver.com, Facebook page facebook.com/JefferyDeaver, and follow him on Twitter @JefferyDeaver.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 55% 33% 9% 2% 1% 55%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 55% 33% 9% 2% 1% 33%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 55% 33% 9% 2% 1% 9%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 55% 33% 9% 2% 1% 2%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 55% 33% 9% 2% 1% 1%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the storyline intriguing and thoroughly enjoyable. They also disagree on the characters, with some finding them interesting and well constructed, while others say they're unbelievable.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the plot intriguing, with plenty of surprises and twists. They also describe the book as a brilliant fast moving Colter Shaw thriller.

" Full of twists and turns that makes it a 'can't put down' book. Thoroughly enjoyed it. On to the next one." Read more

"...It was a good plot well thought out with a nice twist at the end . Very good. I will, for sure be reading a lot more of Mr Deaver." Read more

"... Very interesting !Colter is a character who is growing on me, and I find myself looking forward to his next adventure." Read more

" Story has a goodtwist .But the story has two flaws ...-..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characters in the book. Some find them interesting and well constructed, while others say they're unbelievable.

"... Great characters and plot and very difficult to put the books down...." Read more

"So many characters and names and unbelievable characters , just wanted the end...." Read more

"...The Story Line Was Unique; Interesting, Full Of Unusual Characters And Strange Plot Twists.The Script Was Up To MR Deaver's Usual Standard." Read more

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• Pedro Almodóvar’s <i>The Room Next Door</i> Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

F or those who have been following his career from the start , the idea of Pedro Almodóvar’s growing older—and increasingly using his films to reflect on illness and death, or at least just the inevitable slowdown that comes for most of us—is a bitter pill. None of us relishes thinking about our own mortality. But sometimes it feels worse to think about losing an artist we love, especially one as vital and ageless as Almodóvar. One of his finest, most moving works , 2019’s Pain and Glory , reckoned with the nuisances of aging, as well as the trauma of being an artist in crisis. But the director’s first English-language movie, The Room Next Door —playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival —delves even further into the murky waters of our feelings about death. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as Ingrid and Martha, old friends who bonded in New York in the 1980s but who have been out of touch for a long time. They reconnect when Ingrid learns that Martha is being treated for cancer, and their rekindled friendship veers into complicated territory.

The Room Next Door is an adaptation, written by Almodóvar himself, of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, and at first the movie’s tone feels a little strange, untethered to any easily identifiable genre. It’s a story about friendship, clearly, but also about a woman facing a solitary and difficult choice. The dialogue sometimes feels flat and wooden. At one point Martha reminds Ingrid of the lover they’d once shared, though technically, he’d drifted toward Ingrid after he and Martha had broken up. “He was a passionate and enthusiastic lover, and I hope he was for you too,” Martha says, and though she means it, the line hits with a thud. And even if Almodóvar goes for a laugh here or there, overall the tone of The Room Next Door is a bit somber—almost like a black comedy, but not quite.

Read more: The Best New Movies of August 2024

And yet, by the end, something almost mystical has happened: the movie’s final moments usher in a kind of twilight, a state of grace that you don't see coming. Ingrid, a successful writer, first hears of Martha’s illness at a signing event for her most recent book. Though she hasn’t seen Martha in years, she dutifully visits her at the hospital where she’s being treated. They catch up quickly: Martha, who worked for years as a war correspondent, has a daughter, Michelle, born when she was still a teenager. Michelle has accused Martha of being a bad mother, and is particularly resentful that she has withheld information about Michelle’s father. Martha denies none of it. Still, she wishes she and Michelle were closer, and her grave illness—she has stage three cervical cancer—puts a new spin on things. She’s hoping the experimental treatment she’s been receiving will work; she’s devastated when she learns that it isn’t.

And so she procures for herself— on the Dark Web , she tells Ingrid, almost in a whisper—an illegal pill that will put an end to all of it. She has worked out all the details: she’ll leave a note for the police, explaining that she alone is responsible for her fate. And she doesn’t want a stranger discovering her body. When she decides the time is right, what she wants, she says, is to know that a friend is in “the room next door.” She has decided Ingrid will be that friend, though Ingrid, who has a quivering, electric, nervous quality beneath her veneer of self-confidence, at first wants no part of it.

Ingrid has re-entered Martha’s life in a whirlwind of good intentions. But does she really want to help Martha die ? She’s not so sure. (She has also, unbeknownst to Martha, reconnected platonically with that old shared boyfriend; his name is Damian, and he’s played, with a kind of droll swagger, by John Turturro .) Ingrid and Martha’s rekindled friendship seems shaky at first. Martha has decided that she doesn’t want to die in her own smartly appointed Fifth Avenue apartment. So she books a tony modern country house somewhere near Woodstock—it has amazing views of nature that only money can buy—and she and Ingrid pack their bags and drive up. Almost as soon as they arrive, Martha panics. She’s forgotten the precious euthanasia pill; she insists that she and Ingrid drive back to Manhattan immediately to get it. Ingrid barely hides her annoyance; how did she get into this situation, anyway? Briefly, the movie tap-dances into screwball-comedy territory. It would all be very funny, if Martha weren’t suffering so much.

But The Room Next Door is on its way to place of tenderness and accord—we just can’t see it yet. At one point, Martha rages against her illness, but also against the cheap bromides people use when they talk about cancer, often referring to treating it as a “battle,” a test of strength that’s also somehow a measure of virtue. “If you lose, well, maybe you just didn’t fight hard enough,” she says bitterly. No wonder she wants to write the ending to her own story: “I think I deserve a good death."

Swinton’s Martha is frail but still, somehow, has the vitality of a pale blond moon; Moore , with her burgundy-red hair and intense, searching eyes, brings a rush of color into her life. They talk about books, art, movies: Martha has been thinking about the closing lines of James Joyce’s The Dead, so they spend an evening watching John Huston’s gorgeous 1987 version on the rental's DVD player. They make conversation about little things: a recent book that interests them both, Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy, about the partnership of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ; the reproduction of Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun that hangs in the rented house’s hallway. Their idle conversations are a kind of casual nourishment.

It's a pleasure to watch these two actors together. Martha and Ingrid riff against and annoy each another until suddenly, they find their groove, and the movie does too. Shot by Eduard Grau, the film has a rich, handsome look, and the production and costume design are characteristically Almodóvarian in their jubilance. The sets include stunningly orchestrated combinations of pickle green and tomato red; there are artfully shabby velvet couches and walls casually sponged with cobalt-blue paint. (The production designer is Inbal Weinberg; the costumes are by Bina Daigeler.) It’s all marvelous to look at, but this kind of visual splendor might evoke some guilt, too. Is it wrong to be ogling Martha’s fabulous, mega-chunky color-blocked knit pullover when you know, as she does, that death is just one little pill away?

But as the story wheels forward, it becomes clear that the joy Almodóvar takes in colors and patterns isn’t beside the point; it is the point. He’s created a kind of cocoon world for these two women, as they embark together on a bumpy adventure. And that’s how he beckons us into their story. Lime and lilac, scarlet and saffron: he knows what colors work together, which combinations will surprise us or offer a jolt of delight. The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.

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The Perfect Couple release time, preview, and what to expect

By aysha ashley househ | sep 3, 2024.

You are cordially invited to a new murder mystery series on Netflix, and that's The Perfect Couple ! I'm personally very excited about this one just because of the genre, as well as the star-studded cast. And thankfully, the show is coming our way very soon.

The Perfect Couple premieres Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024 starting at 12 a.m. PT / 3 a.m. ET on Netflix . There's a total of 6 episodes in this mystery drama that has a wedding at the center of the story. But before we get to that, we know there's many of you global watches as well. So if you're not in the U.S., here's when you can start streaming the episodes. Check out all the release times below:

The Perfect Couple on Netflix: What to expect

The Perfect Couple , based on the book of the same name by author Elin Hilderbrand, is centered around the duo who's about to get married - Amelia Sacks and Benji Winbury. The Winbury family is "one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket," per the synopsis.

Though Amelia's future mother-in-law is not happy about the pairing, the "famous novelist" preps the most lavish wedding for her son and his bride. All is going well until "a body turns up on the beach" though! All of a sudden, everyone is a suspect. We shared the trailer below:

I mean literally everything about the description and genre of the series has me hooked, and with this star-studded cast? Definitely count me in! Leading the show are Nicole Kidman as Greer Garrison Winbury, Benji's mother and the famous novelist. The supposedly happy couple are Eve Hewson as Amelia and Billy Howle as Benji.

The cast also includes Liev Schreiber as Benji's father Tag Winbury; Dakota Fanning as Benji's sister Abby Winbury; Jack Reynor as Benji's brother Thomas Winbury; Sam Nivola as Benji's brother Will Winbury; Meghann Fahy as Amelia's best friend Merritt Monaco; Ishaan Khattar as Benji's best friend Shooter Dival; Mia Isaac as Chloe Carter, Donna Lynne Champlin as Nikki Henry; and Isabelle Adjani  as Isabel Nallet.

It's great to see Kidman doing more television roles lately, as well as Fanning. I love the versatility the two actresses bring and I'm really looking forward to seeing them in this new show. I also love Hewson from Bad Sisters on Apple TV+, so I know she's going to absolutely nail this role!

Will you be watching? I definitely will! The Perfect Couple drops Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024 on Netflix .

The Perfect Couple and 3 more Netflix limited series still to come in 2024. dark. Next. The Perfect Couple and 3 more Netflix limited series still to come in 2024

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Rachel Kushner’s Surprising Swerve

She and her narrators have always relied on swagger—but not this time.

“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung,” Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd , her 2021 essay collection. “People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.” As a girl in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as “ratty delinquents”—kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating, working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene . Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers’ drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories .

Explore the October 2024 Issue

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In her fiction, Kushner gravitates toward main characters who occupy that same split psychological place . All of her novels—her latest, Creation Lake , is her fourth—feature a young woman, usually a narrator, who shares her way of viewing the world . Kushner often loans her protagonists her own biker swagger, the hard layer of confidence that helps a woman survive in a very male environment. Preferring to write in the first person, she also gives her central characters her distinctive style: Kushner is alternately warm and caustic , funny and slippery, able to swing from high-literary registers to street slang and back in an instant. Her recurring theme has been the limits that even groups of outsiders impose on women, and yet her female characters, no matter how constrained they find themselves, are roving, curious thinkers , using their keen powers of observation to escape subjugation and victimhood—in their minds, if not in their circumstances.

With every book, Kushner has grown more interested in the push-pull between material restriction and psychic freedom. She’s especially intrigued by the effect that gender roles have on her characters’ strategies for navigating that tension. In each of her novels, a woman tries to both resist and exploit conventional ideas about female behavior. One of the main characters in Telex From Cuba , her 2008 debut, is a burlesque dancer named Rachel K (her name is taken from a real historical figure, though of course Kushner is winking in the mirror), whose very literal performance of femininity attracts some of the most powerful men in prerevolutionary Cuba . Her evident goal is to use these men to her own ends, but she winds up getting conscripted into their service instead.

Such failures of self-liberation continue through Kushner’s next novel, 2013’s The Flamethrowers , which was a breakout for her. Its protagonist, Reno, is a biker and an emerging artist who covets the independence and aura of influence that seem to come so easily to the men in both the art world and the 1970s Italian radical underground , of which she briefly becomes a part. Unlike Rachel K, Reno’s not a seductress. She’s not interested in seducing the reader, either. What Reno offers in place of charm is commentary so wryly smart and dispassionate that, especially in contrast with the male blowhards she repeatedly encounters, she seems powerful. But over the course of the novel, Kushner builds a skidding sense of perilousness, a feeling that no one, Reno included, is in charge or exempt from the mounting chaos. In the end, as Reno and the reader may have sensed all along, her detachment is just another performance , a cool-girl put-on not so different from Rachel K’s burlesque.

Read: Great sex in the time of war

The irony that the aloof-observer stance turns into yet another trap is not lost on either Kushner or her narrators. Romy, the protagonist of The Mars Room (2018), takes especially bleak stock of her plight, and for good reason. She’s serving two life sentences after killing a stalker who latched on to her at the Market Street strip club where she worked and began menacing her and her child in their private life. For Romy, her flat narration (counterposed with excerpts from the Unabomber’s diary and chapters voiced by a sex-obsessed crooked cop) is a way of walling herself off, creating the mental freedom to imagine escape. Whether flight is a real act of hope, though, remains deliberately ambiguous. It may be an attempt at suicide.

Again and again, Kushner scrambles conventional ideas about gender, skewering male bravado while also subverting familiar ideas of femininity. Who and what counts as weak, she wants to know, and why? Stubborn stereotype portrays women as prey to emotion, unable to rein themselves in, yet in book after book, her protagonists’ relentless restraint has stood in stark contrast to the egotistical, violent impulsiveness of the men around them . In Creation Lake , Kushner complicates this dynamic. Her protagonist, Sadie Smith, is another dispassionate observer, but one who appears to have far more independence and agency than her predecessors. She’s a lone wolf, a private intelligence agent who has shucked off her home, her past, and even her name: “Sadie Smith” is an alias.

At the novel’s start, she’s en route to the Guyenne, a rural region in southwestern France, where she’s been hired to spy on Pascal Balmy, the leader of Le Moulin, a group of environmental radicals intent on sabotaging Big Agriculture. She has no idea who’s paying her or what their larger agenda might be, and yet she’s convinced that she’s playing her assigned part to perfection. Indeed, she has such faith in her toughness, acuity, and ability to dupe men that she considers herself all but invincible. Her vigilant predecessors Romy and Reno were much warier and wiser than Sadie, who loves bragging that any innocence she displays is just a pose.

Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it

Creation Lake is not a conventional spy novel, but, unlike Kushner’s shaggy earlier books, it often feels as tight as a thriller. Sadie’s “secret bosses” have sent her to the Guyenne not just to embed herself in Pascal’s group, but to undermine it. Gradually, readers understand that her assignment has a deadlier side—a realization that Sadie either suppresses or notices less quickly than she should, perhaps the most glaring giveaway that she’s not quite the clever spy she thinks. She’s sloppy, distractible, as drunk on her perception of her own power as any engine-revving “king of the road,” to use her derisive phrase for the swellheaded bikers among whom she first went undercover.

Sadie is also more impressionable—and less happy—than she’s ready to admit, which generates psychological ferment beneath the surface espionage plot. Creation Lake gets some of its suspense from its action, but Kushner mainly builds tension inside her narrator’s head. Sadie spends much of the novel reading Pascal’s correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, an aging philosopher whose opposition to modern civilization inspired Le Moulin at its founding. Living in a cave now, he reveres the collaborative and artistic Neanderthals, “who huddled modestly and dreamed expansively.” Initially, she dismisses Bruno’s ideas as crackpot, but they come to preoccupy her. For years, she’s told herself that she was content to carry out small parts of big, murky plans, duly suppressing her curiosity. Bruno’s emails urge her to take a broader, more inquisitive view: of humanity, of history, of alternative ways she could live. But once Sadie starts asking questions, things inside her start falling apart.

Not least, she starts questioning masculinity—or, rather, her ideas about it, which have dictated her espionage strategies and what she considers her success in the field. In the presence of others, Sadie the operative plays up her feminine sexual allure and compliance, but Sadie the narrator treats readers to a distinctly macho version of swagger. More than once, she notes that her breast augmentation is a calculated professional asset; she seems convinced that the same is true of her rootlessness and emotional disengagement. A hard drinker and frat-boy-style slob, she often seems to be trying to outman the men around her in her own mind, even as she must submit to them in reality.

Perhaps Sadie’s most traditionally masculine quality is her terror of weakness. But over the course of Creation Lake , as Sadie’s mission within Le Moulin gets riskier, she sees that her constant projection of control is alienating her from her desires, hollowing out her vaunted autonomy, making her easy to manipulate. She’s shattered—doubly so, because falling apart emotionally shocks her. It’s a fate Kushner withheld from her previous, more guarded protagonists. By letting tough-guy Sadie break down, she writes a radical conversion that is also a bold authorial leap: Kushner lets herself ask, for the first time in her career, what happens to a woman unmoored by masculine and feminine categorizing.

Putting Sadie under such intense pressure changes Creation Lake ’s nature as a story. Once Sadie starts cracking, the novel doesn’t become digressive and loose like its predecessors, but it certainly stops feeling like a thriller. After many chapters that seemed to build to a dramatic act of sabotage, the story shifts register, heading into a very different, more emotional denouement. Relinquishing some swagger, Kushner opens up in her writing to new levels of feeling and possibilities for change.

In the process, she shakes up gender stereotypes in new ways. Creation Lake asks what sources of strength might be found in the kind of vulnerability, physical and emotional, that is associated with femininity. Sadie has prided herself on her supremely instrumental view of sex; she’d never get hysterical, never get too attached or lose her reason over a man. Although the strategic romance she’s begun with Lucien, a friend of Pascal’s, physically disgusts her, she boasts about not letting that get in her way. Kushner leans into the irony here: The reader sees well before Sadie does that her employers are exploiting precisely this blind willingness to obey them at real emotional cost to herself.

For all that she wants to treat her body as a professional resource, she can’t do it. Kushner’s exploration of sex as a catalyst for Sadie’s emotions breaking free is fascinating. Repelled by Lucien, she risks her job by beginning an affair with a partnered member of Le Moulin that starts out enjoyable but leaves her feeling abject; in its aftermath, Sadie begins nursing bigger doubts about her life. This drama could seem retrograde, but coming from Kushner, a restored connection between female body and mind feels less traditional than transformative.

Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears

Sex isn’t Sadie’s only route to a softer self. She also follows a more intellectual path to which she is led by Bruno, the cave-dwelling philosopher. Although Bruno has retreated from contemporary society, his reflections are what get Sadie to reconsider her pride in her nomadic self-sufficiency. She has long bridled at the notion that women should do—and enjoy—domestic work, and is emphatic that she will never have a baby. But she’s swayed by Bruno’s devotion to the painted caves and their former inhabitants, and by her own images of Bruno as a father, after she learns that he has grown children. Indeed, she develops a sort of daughterly love for Bruno.

By the end of the novel, his meditations bring out the feelings that she has most wanted to suppress: homesickness, nostalgia, loneliness. After reading an email in which Bruno describes his sense of being existentially lost, she says aloud, “I feel that way too.” The sound of her voice “let something into the room,” Sadie goes on, “some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above.” What Sadie sees is herself crying alone in bed, an image more suited to a teen movie than a Kushner novel. Yet this moment is no performance. In the grip of uncontrollable emotion, Sadie recognizes both her vulnerability and her desire to drastically change her life.

For Kushner, too, lowering the barricades against the clichés of femininity has an effect at once jarring and liberating. Her earlier novels veer away from culminating clarity, their explosive yet enigmatic endings reminding readers that her characters are too trapped and disempowered to change in the ways they want to. In Creation Lake , Sadie’s transfigured consciousness is a kind of resolution that might be mistaken for a sentimental promise of sunniness ahead—except that Kushner gives her narrator a new, daunting challenge. At the novel’s close, Sadie has already started experimenting with a life in which she engages fully rather than contorting herself to perform roles that others expect. She’s now armed with an agenda of her own, one that promises to turn her into a woman who couldn’t care less about what anyone thinks woman means. Creation Lake ’s radicals aren’t likely to upend society, but Sadie’s swerve suggests that Kushner is ready for big change.

This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve.”

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France Confronts Horror of Rape and Drugging Case as 51 Men Go on Trial

A man is accused of drugging his wife and then inviting dozens of men to rape her over almost a decade. The questions raised by the case have unsettled the country.

By Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic

Reporting from Paris

For years, she had been losing hair and weight. She had started forgetting whole days, and sometimes appeared to be in dreamlike trances. Her children and friends worried she had Alzheimer’s.

But in late 2020, after she was summoned to a police station in southern France, she learned a far more shattering story.

Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, the police said, and then raping her. He had ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too, they said, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade.

Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects.

On Monday, 51 men, including Mr. Pelicot, went on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the broader culture in which such crimes could occur.

The accused men represent a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.

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Trump Isn’t the Only One H.R. McMaster Takes to Task in His New Book

H.R. McMaster’s At War With Ourselves , a memoir of his 13 months as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has aroused much attention for its stinging criticism of the former (and, God help us, possibly future) president. But the publicity and TV interviews have been too narrowly focused. McMaster also takes dead aim at a vast cast of others who got in his way or disagreed with his views: Secretaries of Defense and State Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson; Trump’s mischief-makers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus; his successor, John Bolton; White House chief of staff John Kelly; and, not least, Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

The hero of this well-written and entertaining tale is H.R. McMaster himself, and its grand theme is what a great shame it was that the president didn’t take his advice more often. It is an oddly presumptuous theme for a three-star general—a hero of both Iraq wars—who was, and is, more intellectual than most of his Army brethren but who had never worked in Washington or engaged in any policy issues outside the Middle East.

During the Iraq war, McMaster thoroughly studied the history and theory of counterinsurgency warfare, then applied his learnings as regiment commander in the province of Tal Afar with remarkable success. Entering Trump’s White House, he studied the handbooks and protocols on the division of responsibilities between the national security adviser and the various Cabinet secretaries—and thought his mastery would once again guide him to dominance.

He never grasped—and still doesn’t; not completely anyway—the vast divide between theory and reality in the minefields of Washington politics.

McMaster led teams of talented analysts in the NSC staff to write impressive documents on geopolitics, a new approach to China, and other weighty matters. Trump, of course, never read them (few presidents peruse such documents); his bureaucratic rivalries had their own priorities, which he was ill-equipped to reconcile. A deputy warns him early on in his tenure that Washington is “nothing like your experience in the military.” Here, she warns, “friends stab you in the chest.”

McMaster does emerge from his adventure with shrewd insights into the commander in chief’s failures, and it is these insights that have (rightly) boosted the book’s appeal. For instance: “Trump’s ego and insecurities” left him vulnerable to “flattery,” a fact easily exploited by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Saudi royal family, and his own lackeys, who viewed White House meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy,” in which common phrases included “Your instincts are always right” and “You are the only one who,” which encouraged Trump to “stray from the topic at hand or to say something outlandish—like ‘Why don’t we just bomb the drugs’ in Mexico or ‘Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean army during one of their parades.’ ”*

Trump’s “lack of historical knowledge” made him susceptible to Xi Jinping’s self-serving account of Beijing’s rights to the South China Sea. The “fragility of his ego and his deep sense of aggrievement” made it particularly easy for Putin to “play him like a fiddle.”

Still, McMaster saw his role as helping to execute the president’s policies—a role bolstered by his insistence on remaining an active-duty officer (who has a legal obligation to carry out the president’s legal orders). And in this sense, he misunderstood the hostility mounted against him and the president by Mattis and Tillerson.

Both men—Mattis a retired Marine four-star general, Tillerson a former Exxon CEO—were supremely self-confident. They each expected McMaster to roll over to their demands; McMaster resisted, thinking his job was to coordinate administration policy. Mattis was especially condescending toward McMaster, viewing the relationship as that of a four-star to a three-star—and, in military culture, the supremacy of a four-star over a three-star is enormous.

McMaster viewed their connivances as purely a competition for “control.” But much more was going on. As we now know, and knew to a large extent at the time, Mattis and Tillerson viewed Trump as a danger who needed to be contained. Mattis spent much time traveling abroad, downplaying Trump’s America-first ramblings, assuring allies that the United States would always have their back; some thought his title should have been “secretary of reassurance.”

McMaster complains in the book that Mattis “slow-rolled” Trump’s requests for “contingency planning on North Korea and Iran.” What he omits from his account is that Trump wanted contingency planning for a military strike on those two countries; they thought that he really wanted to initiate a strike and that slow-rolling the request would restrain his impulse toward war. When Kelly, another retired general, started joining the private meetings with Mattis and Tillerson, McMaster thought, “Tillerson and Mattis have gotten to him. ” But in fact, what Kelly got was the supreme danger of Trump. And the three men left McMaster out of their cabal because they knew—in part because he still wore the uniform—that he’d sworn to take Trump’s side. McMaster reveals that, at one point, Kelly told an aide to let him know whenever McMaster was meeting alone with Trump.

McMaster understands all this to some degree. “Tillerson and Mattis were not just confident in themselves,” he writes near the end of the book. “They often lacked confidence in a president they regarded as impulsive, erratic, and dangerous to the republic.”

In a particularly revealing passage, McMaster writes that Trump’s incitement of insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, “might be invoked as an ex post facto justification for their [Mattis’ and Tillerson’s] behavior. But in August 2017, I was just trying to help the elected president set his course.” In fact, Jan. 6 can be seen as evidence that the two Cabinet secretaries were right—and that by helping Trump set his course, McMaster was sharpening the danger.

But McMaster is correct that Mattis and Tillerson were incompetent plotters. “The more independent of the president and the White House they became,” he writes, “the less effective they would be.” And that is what happened. Tillerson was fired even before McMaster was. (He was a terrible secretary of state who, among other things, put the interests of ExxonMobil above those of the United States, perhaps in part because he saw them as identical.) Mattis was an insular defense secretary —he surrounded himself with fellow Marine officers, many of whom had served with him abroad—and had no idea how to deal either with the Pentagon’s civilians or with the people in the White House, whom he held in contempt, to his ultimate self-defeat.

It’s a shame: On the issues, Mattis and McMaster agreed on much. Had they worked together, they might have steered Trump in a more sustainably sensible direction. That they didn’t is more Mattis’ fault than McMaster’s. John Bolton had plenty of high-level bureaucratic experience; when he replaced McMaster at the White House, he shut Mattis out completely. (In a remarkable exchange in the book, which takes place when McMaster knew he was on the way out, he tells Mattis, “I hope you get John Bolton, because you deserve John Bolton.” A red-faced Mattis replies, “At ease, Lieutenant General”—“at ease” being a phrase that senior officers invoke to put subordinates in their place—“you can’t talk to me that way.”)

Still, in the book’s postscript, McMaster hopes “that young people who have persevered through these pages will conclude that, even under challenging circumstances, there are tremendous rewards associated with service under any administration.”

Alas, the case he presents for a rewarding experience, at least in the Trump administration, is flimsy. Earlier in the book, he notes, “Despite the frictions I was encountering,” he and his team “were helping Trump make sound decisions.” He cites as examples Trump’s “long-overdue correctives to unwise policies” toward China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran.

He makes something of a point on China, where the administration was fairly unified in dropping the long-standing hope—held, to some extent, by every president since Nixon—that engagement would lure Beijing into the Western-dominated global system. But Trump’s correctives, mainly levying tariffs and launching a trade war, had little effect other than to hurt American consumers.

On the other areas, McMaster’s boast rings hollow. On Russia, Trump caved to Putin at every opportunity. On North Korea, after McMaster’s departure, and to Bolton’s frustration, Trump commenced a bromance with Kim Jong-un, again to no effect. His reimposition of sanctions on Cuba—which Obama had started to lift—helped nothing. Scuttling the nuclear deal with Iran had no effect on Tehran’s mullahs, except to spur them to revive their uranium-enrichment program, which the deal had halted.

It is worth delving a bit into McMaster’s comments on Cuba and Iran because they reveal, despite his harsh critique of Trump, a deeply partisan analyst.

He states that Obama pursued a policy of “accommodating Iran,” which had the effect of strengthening Hezbollah. He avoids noting that Obama retained several sanctions having to do with Iran’s missile program and its ties to terrorist groups. Nor does he note that under the nuclear deal, Iran was well on its way to dismantling its nuclear program under tight international inspections—until Trump scuttled the deal. As a result , Iran is now closer to building an atom bomb than it has ever been. (McMaster, by the way, writes in agreement with Trump that the accord was “the worst deal ever.”)

He also asserts that Biden would “resurrect the Obama policy of accommodating Iran”—a claim that is simply puzzling. Biden did not revive the Iran nuclear deal (though I was among many who urged him to do so ), nor did he relax the sanctions against Iran that Trump reimposed. Biden has also helped Israel defend and retaliate against Iran’s attempted attacks. Where is the accommodation?

In another utterly mystifying (and uncharacteristically far-right) jeremiad, McMaster writes that Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with Cuba stemmed from a “New Left interpretation of history at America’s top universities, where students learned that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed and that geopolitics is a choice between socialist revolution and servitude under ‘capitalist imperialism.’ ” This is ridiculous. Obama’s policy was driven by a realization that America’s half-century-long isolation of Cuba had done nothing to change the regime and was only hurting the tiny island’s people. McMaster also writes, “Obama, like Trump, evinced an unseemly affinity for authoritarians”—a truly bizarre contention.

And so, while McMaster certainly won’t endorse Trump in the November elections or go work for him again (though there’s no chance, especially after this book, that he’d be asked), it’s also unlikely that he’ll endorse Kamala Harris. (He has said he’s not endorsing any candidate.)

One point of this book, I suspect, is rehabilitation. Back when he was an Army major, McMaster wrote a Ph.D. dissertation turned book, called Dereliction of Duty , about how senior officers in the 1960s deliberately misled President Lyndon B. Johnson on the war in Vietnam, telling him what he wanted to hear rather than giving him their honest military advice, thus betraying their constitutional obligations.

A few months into his term in Trump’s White House, McMaster was ordered to go talk to the press about reports that, at a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump had revealed classified information to top Russian officials. McMaster recited a carefully written, very deceptive script: a “non-denial denial.” One of his former colleagues told me at the time that the statement left him “heartbroken.” A fellow retired Army officer mused, “I wonder what title will be given to the book written about him .” I should add that, in the book, McMaster refers to the column I wrote at the time:

The journalist Fred Kaplan, who wrote an essay entitled “The Tarnishing of H.R. McMaster,” stated that I “had been all but incapable of guile” but was “now soaked in the swamp of deceit in the service of Trump.” I was more amused than offended at his hyperbolic criticism.

The book doesn’t come clean about what really happened; most readers, who won’t remember the incident, will be left confused.

Still, At War With Ourselves provides McMaster—now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University—a chance to cut all ties with Trump, to point out the many times that he openly disagreed with Trump and tried to push Trump in the right direction, occasionally successfully. It’s an attempt to set the record straight and to fix for himself an honorable legacy, very different from that of the generals and admirals who abetted Lyndon Johnson’s horrors in Vietnam. In that, he has for the most part succeeded.

Correction, Sept. 3, 2024: This piece originally misidentified Kim Jong-un as Kim Jong-il.

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Hunting Time (A Colter Shaw Novel) Paperback – Large Print, December 13, 2022

• Book 4 of 4 Colter Shaw
• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Large Print
• Publication date December 13, 2022
• Dimensions 6.05 x 0.94 x 9.2 inches
• ISBN-10 0593632648
• ISBN-13 978-0593632642
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (December 13, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593632648
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593632642
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.05 x 0.94 x 9.2 inches
• #21,787 in Murder Thrillers
• #63,958 in Suspense Thrillers
• #333,439 in Genre Literature & Fiction

About the author

Jeffery deaver.

Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into over twenty-five languages. He has served two terms as president of Mystery Writers of America, and was recently named a Grand Master of MWA, whose ranks include Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Mary Higgins Clark and Walter Mosely.

The author of over forty novels, three collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, he’s received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards. His "The Bodies Left Behind" was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller "The Broken Window" and a stand-alone, "Edge," were also nominated for that prize. "The Garden of Beasts" won the Steel Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in England. He’s also been nominated for eight Edgar Awards by the MWA.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Strand Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy.

His book "A Maiden’s Grave" was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel "The Bone Collector" was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Lifetime aired an adaptation of his "The Devil’s Teardrop." NBC television recently aired the nine-episode prime-time series, "Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector."

You can find out more about Jeffery on his website www.jefferydeaver.com, Facebook page facebook.com/JefferyDeaver, and follow him on Twitter @JefferyDeaver.

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Customers find the characters well developed and interesting. They also describe the plot twists as expected and hard to put down. Readers also mention the book is extremely well written and hard-to-put-down.

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Customers like the plot, saying Jeffrey Deaver is the master of plot twists. They also say the book has a satisfying conclusion.

"...This is my first Colter Shaw. More action and a little less technical than the Lincoln Rhyme thrillers. Jeffery Deaver novels are worth the price." Read more

"So far, this is the best of the Colter Shaw series. An excellent stand-alone story ...." Read more

"...The energy and plot are fast paced and the ending is surprising in a not too cliche way." Read more

"...read dozens of JD’s novels (as I have), the author’s hallmark plot device become problematic . How so?..." Read more

Customers find the characterization in the book nice.

"I loved this book. Clearly written, great characters , the only downside was the miracle escape leitmotif. Recommend it wholeheartedly." Read more

"The plot has lots of side characters , each with a personality to match...." Read more

"...The story itself is solid; composed of very good story, character development , intrigue and double-crosses, told as snippets that becim cliff-hangers..." Read more

"...No six-shooters that shoot 8 or 10 shots. Great character development ...." Read more

Customers find the book entertaining, well written, and hard to put down.

"I loved this book. Clearly written , great characters, the only downside was the miracle escape leitmotif. Recommend it wholeheartedly." Read more

"...ever be helpful (or life saving), & boy are they entertaining, EXTREMELY well written , hard to put down & now are my FAVORITE series...." Read more

"...The prose is simple but descriptive and the pacing is designed to keep readers turning pages...." Read more

"Colter Shaw is a great character and Jeffrey Deaver a MOST excellent writer !!! I believe I’ve read most everything Mr. Deaver has written...." Read more

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