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Summary
Summary
One of Kirkus Review's "Best Books of 2013"
The shocking end is only the beginning . . .
#1 bestselling author Jeffery Deaver has created the most riveting and original novel of the year-a race-against-the-clock mystery, told in reverse.
The October List
Gabriela waits desperately for news of her abducted daughter.
At last, the door opens.
But it's not the negotiators. It's not the FBI.
It's the kidnapper.
And he has a gun.
How did it come to this?
Two days ago, Gabriela's life was normal. Then, out of the blue, she gets word that her six-year-old daughter has been taken. She's given an ultimatum: pay half a million dollars and find a mysterious document known as the "October List" within 30 hours, or she'll never see her child again.
A mind-bending novel with twists and turns that unfold from its dramatic climax back to its surprising beginning, The October List is Jeffery Deaver at his masterful, inventive best.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thriller Award-winner Deaver (Edge) delivers a clever, demanding stand-alone that moves backward in time over the span of a three-day weekend, from Sunday evening to early Friday morning. In the first chapter, office manager Gabriela McKenzie, whose six-year-old daughter, Sarah, has been kidnapped, waits in her Manhattan apartment for news from fund manager Daniel Reardon, who's attempting to deal with kidnapper Joseph Astor. Gabriela must not only pay a $500,000 ransom but also fork over the mysterious "October List," which belongs to her former boss Charles Prescott, the head of Prescott Investments, who has fled from a police investigation. As the ingenious plot folds back on itself, the reader has to reevaluate and reinterpret the constantly shifting "facts" in the case. The finished picture finally emerges with a shock of recognition. This is brilliant craftsmanship in a vastly entertaining package. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Remember Merrily We Roll Along, the Sondheim musical out of Kaufman and Hart that began with its climactic scene and worked backward to the beginning? Deaver's borrowed the same concept and juiced it with assorted felonies, nonstop suspense and his trademark braininess. The opening scene seems both to begin and to end in medias res. Gabriela McKenzie, whose 6-year-old daughter Sarah has been kidnapped by Joseph Astor, waits with insurance executive Sam Easton for the return of his boss, Andrew Faraday, and venture capitalist Daniel Reardon. The two men have gone to deliver the item Joseph demanded: the October List, a document containing contact information for the secret clients of Gabriela's boss, wealthy investment counselor Charles Prescott. But the scene ends with the threatening entrance of Joseph, not Andrew and Daniel. From that moment on, Deaver (The Kill Room, 2013, etc.) sucks you into a whirlwind reverse-chronology tour of Gabriela's nightmare weekend: her tense interviews with a pair of New York cops, her ransacking of Prescott's office to find the October List, the encounter in which Joseph tells her that he's got Sarah, the news that Prescott has vanished with his firm's money, her meet-cute with Daniel, all punctuated by the sudden, shocking crimes Gabriela and others commit in the pursuit of the elusive list. The conceit of a tale unrolling backward in time initially seems daunting, but it's not so different from the way lots of detective stories--or for that matter lots of Ibsen plays--unfold, and Deaver dispenses expository bits and cliffhangers with a mastery that'll make you smile even more broadly after you realize how thoroughly you've been hoodwinked. Perhaps the cleverest of all Deaver's exceptionally clever thrillers. If you've ever wished you could take the film Memento to the beach, here's your chance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Illustrated with the author's own eerie photographs, the chapters that follow move back in time to 8:20 a.m. on Friday, when the plot machinery was first set in motion. In the beginning (the end?), it seems like a straightforward narrative about a woman named Gabriela McKenzie who innocently finds herself in possession of a document, the mysterious "October List," that means nothing to her but has made her the target of ruthless criminals. Watching a chase scene, or even a love scene, played out of sequence is pure fun, especially when the complications (which include a knife-wielding character who's actually called "the complication") begin to pile up. But as the pace quickens and the story continues to backtrack, solid evidence, established plot points and sturdily built characters all begin to come undone, until what started out as an interactive game becomes a truly unnerving exercise in deception. BETWEEN 1968 AND 1985, there was a string of double homicides of young lovers in the vicinity of Florence, Italy. Magdalen Nabb made these actual crimes the subject Of THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE (Soho Crime, $26.95), a book first published in Britain in 1996, almost a decade before Nabb died, but only now available here. Which is just as well, because close work on procedural details doesn't suit Nabb's expressive style. Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia, the compassionate detective in this morally complex series, is no big brain, and he knows it. But "what the marshal had was a knowledge of people." He watches, he listens, he asks discreet questions, and his intuitive intelligence ("He either knew things or he didn't") gives him insight into minds closed to reason. This squalid case, which leads the marshal to a village in the Tuscan hills, is one of Nabb's darkest novels, almost shocking in its disenchanted acknowledgment of human brutality. EVEN AT THEIR gloomiest, Magdalen Nabb's mysteries have an air of romanticism that takes the edge off their melancholy tone. There's nothing dreamy, however, about the gritty views of Florence in Christobel Kent's eye-opening novels featuring Sandro Cellini, a private eye who takes on "profoundly depressing" cases for the city's lost and disenfranchised underclasses. In A DARKNESS DESCENDING (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), Cellini's affection for his assistant, Giulietta Sarto, sensitizes him to a younger generation's idealistic yearning for political change. Giuli is an ardent member of a radical reform movement called the Frazione Verde ("so young, so disorganized, they could hardly even chant in time"), and she becomes so distressed when the common-law wife of the group's charismatic leader abandons her infant son and disappears that Cellini supports her in an investigation. Much of their work is done in grimy streets, crowded piazzas and chaotic health clinics, places where no tourist would ever pause to snap a photo. THE ABIDING APPEAL of the COZy mystery owes a lot to our collective memory, true or false, of simpler, sweeter times. Michael Nethercott's nicely put together whodunit, THE SÉANCE SOCIETY (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $24.99), plunges us head first into that warm bath of nostalgia with its setting - a small town in Connecticut in 1956. The methodically constructed narrative is as neat as its locale, a classic puzzle pegged to the murder of a flamboyant entrepreneur who sponsors séances in what everyone knows to be a haunted house. Some of the secondary characters, like the modest woman with genuine psychic gifts, are quite nice. But the author overestimates the charm of his smart-aleck narrator, Lee Plunkett, a private sleuth who aspires to be Archie Goodwin while coming across as more of a meathead. His partner, Mr. O'Nelligan, may lack Nero Wolfe's breadth of knowledge, but this elderly Irishman does have a shrewd grasp of the job of the traditional sleuth: "Our task is nothing less than the restoration of order to the universe."
Library Journal Review
In his second thriller of 2013 (after The Kill Room), set amid the high-octane world of Manhattan's investment brokers, Deaver delivers a devilishly deceitful plot in reverse. Occurring over a three-day weekend, the story begins with its supposed clincher, which takes place on a Sunday afternoon, then moves back to Friday morning's startling climax. Confused yet? Beginning in the present, Gabriela, an office manager at Prescott Investments, waits in her apartment for an update from Daniel Reardon of the Norwalk Fund, who's striking a deal with her daughter's kidnapper for a $500,000 ransom and the notorious missing "October List." This was a document kept by Gabriela's former boss. Verdict Although Deaver doles out plenty of surprising twists and cliffhangers, fans accustomed to his staccato pace, fluid style, and exceptionally clever plotlines may feel a bit hoodwinked after finishing this overly convoluted tale and its disappointing big climax reveal. In the novel's foreword, Deaver wonders if he could pull off telling a tale in reverse. Nope, not in this case-this superb thriller writer missed the mark here.-Jerry P. Miller, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
