I was reading another Deaver novel, “Roadside Crosses.” He just can’t resist a plot twist as long as there is a non-police officer left to suspect. On the one hand, I read the book straight through, no stopping. On the other, I was quite happy with his second to last “ending.” I was happy with the bad guy they’d caught, happy with the emotional resolutions, but then he had just one more plot twist, which ruined the emotional plot arcs he’d set up in the book (at least the ones involving the suspects) for me.

A significant part of “Roadside Crosses” involves a critique of video gaming, going on about how they teach bad lessons to kids. Problem is, while online gaming is expanding rapidly, violence nation wide is going down. For emotional damage, compared to abusive parents and bullies, video games are merely time consuming. Making an online game the center of your life isn’t healthy, but making any one thing the center of your life distorts and displaces everything else in your life. Ask the workaholics who end up divorced because their families never see them. There’s a lot of divorced police officers in these crime novels and TV shows, because they make the job the center of their life.