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Katherine Dance, body language expert for the California Bureau of Investigation, has a lot to deal with in her third book , ROADSIDE CROSSES. The last killer she tracked down might wriggle free on a technicality, and the hearing date keeps changing. Pro-life extremists are picketing the hospital where her mother works because of the euthanasia of a badly-burned police officer. A politician has decided to turn that case into a cause célèbre and mixes in with the maximum of publicity and the minimum of evidence. And someone is leaving roadside crosses along empty stretches of highway. Usually, these homemade memorials mark the spot where someone died - but these have no name and a date in the future marked on them. They don't mark where someone died by accident They warn that someone, some unnamed victim, will be murdered. After the first couple of victims are found, Dance thinks she knows who the culprit is - a cyber-bullied boy lashing out at his oppressors. Can they find him before he fills in those dates? And are they even seeking the right suspect? Deavers has written a book loaded with plenty of hot topics - right to life vs. right to die, overpublicized court cases, gamer communities, online addiction, cyberbullying, blogger's rights - especially bloggers hiding behind their First Amendment rights to keep right on bullying. There's a lot to cover and a lot of action to cover it with as Dance finds herself racing against time while juggling the other cases and her personal life. The plot has some excellent twists that keep the reader guessing. Yet, I can't give ROADSIDE CROSSES an unqualified rave. The idea of a gamer losing track between the real and virtual worlds is a decades old plot point left over from Dungeons and Dragons, and Deaver has Dance spending far too much time focusing on that hoary old canard. Worse are the plot-stopping moments of overexposition. Some concepts require explaining, but Deaver gives more than necessary every time. For the purposes of the book, all you need to know is that "blog" is short for weblog, an online diary. But we get two pages of detail, including the name of the person who coined the term, when he did it, and a complete description and definition of HTTP and HTML, something that could be found in any basic textbook. Because of that, I can't help but think that the action-packed virtues of ROADSIDE CROSSES would probably be best enjoyed in the abridged audio edition, which presumably cuts out these leaden digressions.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, June 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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