Meanwhile, the future of “The Carnivore,” international assassin and arch-criminal, is also in play. The warring factions within the Agency battle for dominance—and for control over The Carnivore’s fate. Will he surrender to Langley? Or remain at large?

  Masquerade has mind control. Brainwashing. Psychological and physical manipulation. The struggle for world dominance. International intrigue. And blistering love scenes.

  But at first, nobody wanted it.

  Lynds’s agent took it to a publisher in 1994. He waited for the call that he expected would bring a big-bucks offer for this groundbreaking thriller. Instead, the call was essentially the first salvo in the thriller suffrage movement.

  As Lynds remembers it, the publisher told her agent, “I love this book, but no woman could have written it.”

  Lynds, shocked, had never considered that might be a reaction. “They literally thought someone else had written Masquerade. Apparently it was difficult for them to imagine that a woman could comprehend the field of espionage, that only a man could ‘get it.’”

  For an educated and experienced author, highly regarded in her field, the accusation was baffling. Demeaning. And ridiculous. “I would put a female killer up against a male any day of the week,” Lynds says. “Women can be as resourceful and effective as any man.”

  She never considered going undercover—changing her name to a man’s or even to unisex initials, to get her cutting-edge espionage novel past the barriers of the old-boy network. “They wanted to make me a pseudo-male,” she says. “Or to shelve my books in romance. I refused.” Ironically, her first name is gender neutral. She was named after her Uncle Gale.

  When Masquerade eventually found a publisher, Lynds’s battle still wasn’t over. The “stupid cover,” as she calls it, of the first edition, features a voluptuous woman in a black bodysuit and high heels. “Just give me a cover like the boys get, I told them.”

  At first, critics saw the gender before the genre. Lynds was “aping her betters” and trying to “cut off” the private parts of male espionage authors, reviewers complained. “It was hard to be taken seriously with all the negativity,” Lynds says. “I was pissed off.”

  Eventually, the public and the critics latched on to Lynds, and the book became a New York Times best seller in paperback. Ten years later, Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly listed it in the top-ten spy novels ever written. It comes in at number eight—just after Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, and ahead of Above Suspicion by Lynds’s literary foremother, Helen MacInnes.

  Lynds is an accidental icon. She insists her objective was telling a good story, not breaking barriers. But when she got push-back from the publishing world, she became as stubborn as one of her heroines. She felt that, if she failed, it would be harder for other female espionage authors. Persistence became a duty.

  Finally, the barriers did come down. Now women espionage writers have the same opportunities as men. Lynds smiles when she’s called “Queen of the Spy Thriller.” In fact, she says, she hopes someone will come along and “knock me off.”

  Award-winning investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan is currently on the air at Boston’s NBC affiliate, where she has broken big stories for the past twenty-four years. Her features have resulted in new laws, people sent to prison, homes removed from foreclosure, and millions of dollars in refunds and restitution for consumers. Along with her twenty-six Emmy awards, Hank also received dozens of other journalism honors. She’s been a legislative aide in the United States Senate (working on the Freedom of Information Act) and wrote for Rolling Stone Magazine (working with Hunter S. Thompson). Her first novel,Prime Time, won the prestigious Agatha Award for Best First Novel. It was a double RITA nominee for Best First Novel and Best Romantic Suspense Novel, and a Reviewers’ Choice Award winner. Her Charlotte McNally thriller series includes Face Time (a Book Sense Notable Book),Air Time, and Drive Time. She is on the board of directors of New England Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America.

  98

  Lee Child’s

  KILLING FLOOR (1997)

  Marcus Sakey

  Born in Coventry, England, Lee Child (1954–) is the best-selling author of the Jack Reacher series. He began his career in British television, where he worked for eighteen years before being laid off in 1995 due to corporate restructuring. Armed with six dollars in paper and pencils, he sat down to write what would become Killing Floor. Sales of the novel now number in the millions, and several sequels about his enormously popular character, including Without Fail, One Shot, The Hard Way, and Nothing to Lose, have been released. Reportedly, the name for Reacher came to him when he accompanied his wife to a grocery story, where she asked him to reach for something off the top shelf. “I’m a reacher,” he thought, and was struck by the word. A devoted Yankees fan, the author lives in New York City.

  Check this out:

  “I was arrested in Eno’s Diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.”

  Seems simple, right? But with these few lines, Lee Child launched an internationally best-selling series and introduced a protagonist of iconic power, a hero built on classic mythic structure and yet inextricably a product of our time. Jack Reacher: former military policeman, wandering arbiter of morality, and caffeine addict.

  At the time of this writing, there are more than thirteen books in the series. They run the gamut from mystery to thriller, from contemporary to flashback, from first to third person. They’re published in forty-three countries and thirty languages and sell at an average of one per second. And the whole story begins here, with Killing Floor (1997), and Reacher sitting in a small-town diner, eating eggs and drinking coffee.

  In this first novel, Reacher is six months out of what he had expected to be a lifelong career in the military police, a victim of downsizing (as was Child when he wrote the novel.) Since leaving the army, he’s been wandering the country, living on his severance pay, and considering, in an idle sort of way, what he’ll do with the rest of his life. Today, though, all he wants is to finish his breakfast and then see what he can find out about a little-known bluesman who may have wandered through this small Georgia town called Margrave.

  But this small town has secrets. A lot of them. Reacher is arrested on suspicion of murder and locked in a holding cell. It doesn’t take long to prove his innocence, but by the time he does, he discovers that one of the murder victims isn’t a random stranger—it’s Reacher’s brother. To get pay-back, he’ll tear Margrave apart.

  The plot is complex and multilayered, schemes interweaving with schemes, and a significant portion of the fun involves watching Reacher navigate through them. While an intensely physical character—the only description given of him is his huge size—his primary weapon is his mind. He is a creature of logic who reasons his way to the solution. And unlike many suspense novels, where the point is to distract readers with sleight of hand, Child wants us along every step of the way. Reacher may be smarter than we are, but his logic is sound and it’s explained, and watching him break the world down is a joy.

  As he fights his way to the climax of Killing Floor, Reacher befriends and falls for a female cop named Roscoe, one of the few people in town with nothing to hide. In Roscoe, Child establishes what will become a tradition in his work. She’s beautiful, yes, but more important, she’s smart, capable, and strong, without ever becoming some teenager’s caricature of feminine power.

  This may explain, in part, the enormous female readership of what appear on the surface to be masculine action novels. But there are two other factors that are more important to the popularity of the series. One is Child’s writing style; the other is the mythic structure of Reacher himself.

  In discussions and reviews of popular fiction, the language tends to be overlooked. Maybe this is academic snobbery; maybe it’s because there is often so much plot to relate. But any story, no matter the genre, is only as good as its telling. Twists and surprises are one method to keep a reader interested, and Child is terrific at them. But more crucial on a moment-to-moment basis is the actual prose.

  Writing is about rhythm and balance and enticement. It’s a dance, a seduction. One good sentence eases a reader into the next one. At a glance, Child’s basic structure and matter-of-fact description seem simplistic. But there is a subtle, calculated beat to it that pulls a reader through like a drum for a march. When someone says that they couldn’t put a book down, that’s only partly because they wanted to find out what happened; it’s also because the rhythm of the prose never gave them the chance.

  Child’s other great triumph is in Reacher himself. The character is based on an archetype as old as storytelling; the knight-errant, the samurai without a master, the crack-shot cowboy who drifts into the company town. A wandering righter-of-wrongs, this character doesn’t seek trouble, but when it finds him, he doesn’t back down. Ever. In the real world, the ruthless and the selfish often succeed; in fiction, the knight-errant is there to stop them.

  That’s a universally appealing myth, and a terrific foundation. But it’s Child’s interpretation that makes Reacher so compelling. For one thing, there is the blue-collar Everyman basis of Reacher. He’s not a tuxedoed James Bond playing high-stakes baccarat. He’s a laid-off soldier who hangs out in diners. He doesn’t drink martinis; he drinks coffee. And not from Starbucks. A man who travels lightly, he wears his ordinary clothes until they are dirty, and then instead of getting them washed, he throws them away. His only luggage is a tooth brush.

  But Child’s real twist on the myth goes beyond that. Typical knight-errant figures are bound by Judeo-Christian ideas of morality. They might kill, but generally as a last resort. They are willing to trust even when faithlessness has been demonstrated. They are, in a word, suckers, and the audience knows it.

  But Reacher follows a different path. He has a code, but it’s dictated by a rough common sense and a belief that evil must be punished. In Killing Floor alone, he shoots men in the back, makes promises of safety and immediately breaks them, fights viciously and sadistically and without mercy. He shatters noses and thumbs out eyeballs and cuts throats. He moves with moral certainty, leaving a trail of bodies, until the wrong in the world has been righted.

  And we stay up way past bedtime, cheering him on.

  According to Marcus Sakey, “ten years in advertising and marketing gave me the perfect experience to write about thieves and killers.” His debut novel,The Blade Itself, was a New York Times Editor’s Pick and named one of Esquire Magazine’s five Best Reads of 2007. His novels At the City’s Edge and Good People have been called “Crime drama for the twenty-first century” (National Public Radio) and “Nothing short of brilliant” (Chicago Tribune).The Amateurs received similar praise. To research his books, he accompanied homicide detectives, toured a morgue, interviewed soldiers, rode with gang cops, and learned to pick a deadbolt in sixty seconds. Film rights for his work have sold to Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire. A diehard Lee Child fan, he lives in Chicago.

  99

  Jeffery Deaver’s

  THE BONE COLLECTOR (1997)

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Before he became a full-time fiction writer, Jeffery Deaver (1950–) was a folksinger, a journalist, and an attorney. In his ambitious thrillers, traces of all those crafts can be found—prose that sings, a keen eye for the decisive moment, and a deep knowledge of the law, of crime, and of police procedure. His novels have appeared on countless best-seller lists, his awards could fill cases, and the movies based on them have starred James Garner, Marlee Matlin, Denzel Washington, and Angelina Jolie. His numerous novels include the stand-alone thrillers A Maiden’s Grave, The Blue Nowhere, The Lesson of Her Death, Praying for Sleep, and others, the Rune series, the John Pellam series (as William Jefferies), the Lincoln Rhyme series that began with The Bone Collector, the Kathryn Dance series, of which The Sleeping Doll was the first, and the Brynn McKenzie series, which debuted with The Bodies Left Behind.

  Literary genres can be defined in terms of the intent of their works. Mysteries are meant to puzzle. Horror books are intended to frighten. Romance novels are designed to create sentimental emotion. If the purpose of thrillers is to thrill, then Jeffery Deaver is a consummate thriller writer.

  I had been reading Jeffery Deaver for a while by the time The Bone Collector was published in 1997 (Praying for Sleep,A Maiden’s Grave, and the Rune trilogy, in particular). Those books were entertaining, powerful thrillers. But The Bone Collector was a step above, the book that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until, gasping for breath, I managed to finish the last page and close the cover.

  Deaver’s earlier novels had been good, but now he had written a great one. In quadriplegic, former criminalist Lincoln Rhyme, he created a character destined to join the ranks of those to whom readers turn time and again. In addition, the book helped to establish a subgenre, one in which I’ve dipped my toes a time or two as the author of comic books and tie-in novels based on the TV shows CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Miami.

  It might not be entirely accurate to suggest that the megapopular CSI television franchise wouldn’t exist without Lincoln Rhyme. Certainly, Patricia Cornwell had been writing books with strong forensic science themes since 1990. But the timing of the bestselling The Bone Collector, and the hit 1999 movie adaptation of the novel starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, certainly helped prepare audiences for the gruesome scenes that would confront them on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spinoff shows.

  It wasn’t the novel’s horrific parts that gripped me as much as it was the interaction between the crippled but brilliant Rhyme and third-year Patrol Officer and former model Amelia Sachs. They are two of the most cleverly matched characters in thriller history. Largely unfamiliar with forensic investigation techniques, Sachs becomes an appendage for the man who can’t use his own, putting all her senses to work and reporting back to him. He leads her step-by-step, remotely, through what seemed to this reader to be the most accurately described crime scene investigation in all fiction at the time.

  Their interaction is kicked off when Amelia finds a finger sticking up from the ground—bloody, stripped of skin, presumably the only visible part of a buried body—encircled by a woman’s ring. Amelia wants to do things the right way, by the book, when she can remember what the book says. She’s smart, ambitious, beautiful, healthy, and strong. A bit overzealous, maybe, but that rarely kills anyone. Her fast driving, however, just might.

  Rhyme is bitter, impatient, rude, unhappily dependent on his aide, Thom, for the most basic bodily functions, suicidally depressed, and when we meet him, unshaven and ungroomed. And he stinks. He’s also brilliant, intuitive, and almost preternaturally observant, the author of a couple of books on crime-scene investigation, and the former head of New York City’s Central Investigation and Resource Department. His mind has an ironclad grasp on a vast array of topics, from the history, geology, sociology, and politics of New York to the various forensic sciences.

  There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the two to get along. We receive an early hint, though—the beautiful Sachs is so used to being viewed as an object of lust that coming into contact with a man who she believes will in no way react to her in a sexual way is a relief. It’s an interesting psychological insight in a book full of them. Rhyme, for all his intellect, is almost entirely nonphysical, and Sachs, while smarter than the average street cop, is physical perfection. Put them together, as Deaver does, and you wind up with a single organism, the ideal crime-solving combination of brains, senses, guts, and functional limbs.

  The character twists—carefully established and thoroughly believable, if unanticipated—surprise as much as the plot twists do. Deaver is determined to keep his readers wondering. All the necessary clues are provided, for those readers who can come close to matching Rhyme’s erudition, but the twists are frequent and startling enough to cause mental whiplash. They demonstrate another characteristic of Deaver’s work, the way in which the puzzle of a traditional mystery is supercharged by the extremes of the crimes that are committed until the novel’s tone borders on horror. His experiment in mixing these genres makes his fiction noteworthy.

  Compelling and intelligent characters combine with Deaver’s narrative intensity and his fascinating well-researched background information to make his work—especially The Bone Collector and the rest of the Lincoln Rhyme series—an object lesson in how to write for maximum, satisfying thrills.

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte is the award-winning author of the supernatural thrillers,River Runs Red, Missing White Girl, and The Slab, as well as, under the name Jeff Mariotte, tie-in novels and comic books, including some based on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: Miami. He has also written dozens of original comic books, including the critically acclaimed horror-Western series,Desperadoes, and the graphic novel,Zombie Cop. A co-owner of San Diego independent genre bookstore Mysterious Galaxy, he lives on the Flying M Ranch in rural Arizona.

  100

  Dan Brown’s

  THE DA VINCI CODE (2003)

  Steve Berry

  A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Amherst College, Dan Brown (1964–) worked as an English teacher before turning his efforts to writing full time. His interest in code breaking and covert government agencies led to his first book,Digital Fortress (1998). Focusing on the National Security Agency, the novel explored the tension between civilian privacy and national security. Brown’s techno-thriller Deception Point (2001) centered on similar issues of morality in politics, national security, and classified technology. In 2000, Brown published Angels & Demons, a thriller that delved into the secret world of a religious group, the Illuminati, and featured Harvard professor of iconography and religious art, Robert Langdon. Brown brought him back in 2003’s The Da Vinci Code, one of the best-selling novels of all time. The unparalleled success of that work landed all four of Brown’s novels on the New York Times best-seller list during the same week in 2004.