Very entertaining, the audio book is VERY well done, and a joy to listen to. Twists and some interesting characters make for a captivating story.
Jeffery Deaver's XO is the latest installment in the increasingly popular Kathryn Dance series. His protagonist, an agent of the California Bureau of Investigation and a body language analysis expert, uses her talents and skills to great effect in a tale that's a bit of a departure from Deaver's previous books.
How so, you ask? Deaver has come to be known for writing plot-driven works that take the reader's assumptions, twist and turn them, and rock them upside down and back again --- sometimes with sleight of hand, other times with some gentle misdirection. XO does not do that, or at least not quite as much as, say, Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme novels. This is a straightforward thriller, creepy as all get-out, with a very smart and dangerous antagonist and a clock that starts ticking the second the reader opens the book.
XO kicks off with a set of email exchanges that set the mood for the entire novel. The correspondence is between Kayleigh Towne and Edwin Sharp. Kayleigh is a country music superstar from Fresno, California, and Edwin is a huge fan of hers --- too big a fan, actually. He believes that the affectionate tone of the letters that Kayleigh's office sends to all of her fans contains words of love meant just for him. In fact, he believes that Kayleigh's hit single "Your Shadow" is directly about him. In these few opening pages, Deaver demonstrates yet again the true depth of his talent: read a few sentences in Edwin's emails, and you can feel your scalp creep and your skin crawl. By the time Edwin is introduced, you want to jump into a hot shower.
Kathryn, who is a friend of Kayleigh's, has taken a few vacation days to attend her homecoming concert in Fresno and walks right into the middle of a dangerous situation. Just hours before she arrives in Fresno, an accident during Kayleigh's rehearsal almost seriously injures the singer. Hours later, a member of her stage crew is killed in a similar incident, which is quickly determined to have been staged.
Meanwhile, Edwin has become Kayleigh's shadow, literally; he has come to Fresno to attend the concert, rented a house for an entire month, and is showing up in all of her familiar haunts. Worse, he seems to know where she will be, what her new phone number is, and all sorts of things about people connected to her, including her assistants and local law enforcement. He is the number one suspect in the death of her stage manager, but there is no proof that he committed any crime. And it looks like he's just getting warmed up. Kathryn's presence draws Edwin's attention toward her, and to make matters worse, she also finds that the local deputy regards her assistance in the murder investigation as unwelcome. It quickly becomes all too clear, however, that the killer, whether it be Edwin or someone else, isn't about to stop with just a single murder. As the days countdown to Kayleigh's long-anticipated homecoming concert, Kathryn and Kayleigh find that they may well have much more to worry about than Edwin.
Edwin Sharp is one of Deaver's best antagonists yet, because he is so real. Persistent, always wrong but never in doubt, he is single-minded in his pursuit of Kayleigh and will certainly remind each and every reader of at least one person who they have encountered in their past. As far as the narrative is concerned, Deaver is at the top of his game, stretching his story over a relatively short period --- six days --- and confining the action almost exclusively to a few blocks of Fresno, yet wringing the maximum drama and suspense out of each and every page. Set aside several hours for XO; once you start it, you will want to read it in one sitting.
Books: Deaver handles celeb stalker plot with realism and panache
by Minnie Apolis
X O is the oddly titled Jeffery Deaver novel of a stalker who trails after a country-pop engenue named Kayleigh Towne. It is a topic was played for laughs in one of the Stephanie Plum novels (Fearless Fourteen), but that's OK. Deaver is good at realism and thrillers, and of course with his recurring character Kathryn Dance, he can't miss.
The stalker, Edwin Sharp, is spooky the way he hacks her newest email address within hours never mind bombarding her with 50 or so emails. He shows up at a lunch at her fave roadside diner early in the book; how did he know when she would be there?
Kayleigh is an enormously gifted singer-slash-songwriter in the country genre, the daughter of another country legend. Her squeaky clean image is the result of burying a deep secret from her teen years. Her mother, incidentally, died about the same time as that other ahem, incident. Strangely enough, her stalker has also gone through a tough period of rejection from a girlfriend and the death of his mother. Geez, they have so much in common, y'know? It's like, in another world, they'd be soul mates.
The bodies start to pile up, with the victims having in common a motive clear to the mind of a stalker. They all stood in the way of the stalker and the object of his desire, or they threatened the well-being of the performer in some fashion.
We know very early on that there is a stalker out there, and we meet him very early in the novel. But Deaver keeps the spinning the needle between Guilty or Innocent so many times that we, the reader, get dizzy from it. Sure he's weird, but he's just a harmless loser. Or no, he's not harmless, he's just a good faker and a really dangerous psychopath.
We don't learn the answer till several red herrings have been played out. There are, as usual in a Deaver novel, several twists and turns in the plot, which turns out to have two guilty parties in this instance. The final, small twist on the last page is the one I am not buying, tho it hardly makes any difference in the larger picture.
I'll give it three and a half stars out of five. I am a very tough grader, so you may rate it higher.
