| The Monterey Peninsula is rocked when a killer begins to leave roadside crosses beside local highways -- not in memoriam, but as announcements of his intention to kill. And to kill in particularly horrific and efficient ways: using the personal details about the victims that they've carelessly posted in blogs and on social networking websites.
The case lands on the desk of Kathryn Dance, the California Bureau of Investigation's foremost kinesics -- body language-expert. She and Deputy Michael O'Neil follow the leads to Travis Brigham, a troubled teenager whose role in a fatal car accident has inspired vicious attacks against him on a popular blog, The Chilton Report.
As the investigation progresses, Travis vanishes. Using techniques he learned as a brilliant participant in MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, he easily eludes his pursuers and continues to track his victims, some of whom Kathryn is able to save, some not. Among the obstacles Kathryn must hurdle are politicians from Sacramento, paranoid parents and the blogger himself, James Chilton, whose belief in the importance of blogging and the new media threatens to derail the case and potentially Dance's career. It is this threat that causes Dance to take desperate and risky measures...
In signature Jeffery Deaver style, Roadside Crosses is filled with dozens of plot twists, cliff-hangers and heartrending personal subplots. It is also a searing look at the accountability of blogging and life in the online world. Roadside Crosses is the third in Deaver's bestselling High-Tech Thriller Trilogy, along with The Blue Nowhere and The Broken Window.
Annotation:
Bestselling author Jeffrey Deaver loads up another page-turning techno-thriller with ROADSIDE CROSSES. The plot picks up shortly after THE SLEEPING DOLL and features California Bureau investigator Kathryn Dance, who's still dealing with some of the fallout from her previous case. Now Kathryn and her crew have to negotiate the social mores of high schoolers and the nuances of the internet in order to put a stop to a killer who's forecasting his victims with roadside crosses. Travis Brigham was driving when a car accident occurred, killing the other two teenage passengers. Now kids from his school, many of whom would never say anything face-to-face, are skewering him on a blog, and Travis--who's also a big-time online role-playing gamer, is getting even. Deaver keeps the action coming fast (the book takes place across four breathless days), while managing not to fall into the trap of broadly villainizing technology, its proponents, or its opponents.
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Author Bio| Jeffery Deaver | | Jeffery Wilds Deaver was born and raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Missouri and received a law degree from Fordham University. A self-described "terrible attorney," Deaver quit the law in 1990 to pursue a full-time writing career based on his fascination with and love of suspense. "When I teach courses in writing," Deaver said in a barnesandnoble.com interview, "I always tell my students to write what you enjoy reading and I have always been a big fan of the sort of book I write--the plot-driven commercial thriller." Deaver's modus operandi has proven lucrative since his first book was published in the early 1990s. Several of his books have achieved best-seller status and two--THE BONE COLLECTOR (1997) and A MAIDEN'S GRAVE (1995)--have been adapted for film. Deaver's sister, Julie Reece Deaver, is an author of young adult books. |
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