Deviant Ways
Chris MooneyBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Punctuated with one blisteringly violent and unpredictable twist after another, this pitch-perfect study of psychological terror spotlights two magnificent minds opposed in a no-holds-barred duel of cunning and depravity.
A master killer calling himself the Sandman is out for revenge. He's slaughtering not just one person at a time but whole families and whole neighborhoods, unleashing devastating explosions nationwide, and watching the horror unfold on a sophisticated network of surveillance cameras. No one knows why he is committing his crimes, or where he'll strike next.
But one man — Jack Casey — knows this: the Sandman wants him in the middle of the case, and wants him to suffer...
Jack was the FBI's top profiler until a psychopath's unspeakable crime shattered his life. Now Jack is starting over as a detective in a posh shoreline community outside Boston, and involved with a beautiful woman who knows nothing about his shocking past. But the Sandman has found him, and his cutting-edge electronic devices are silently monitoring Jack's every move. Knowing that a showdown is imminent, Jack turns in desperation to Malcolm Fletcher, a strange and brilliant fallen angel from the profiling unit. Fletcher is wanted by the FBI. And he possesses the key to unlocking the Sandman's demented mind.
As Jack Casey confronts evidence that the evil he's fighting may have emanated from his own side of the law, the Sandman's motivations begin to appear and a wild chase ensues. But while racing against time to save the next family, Jack is led deeper into the dark and terrifying tunnels of his fragile mind — a place where the Sandman awaits, to deal his final master stroke of vindictive cruelty.
Deviant Ways is a breathtaking and unforgettable first novel that catapults Chris Mooney into suspense fiction's highest ranks. A harrowing journey through ordinary streets turned into scenes of unimaginable terror, it careens from cries of mass murder to whispers within the mind — in a disturbing cat-and-mouse game of righ-teousness, loss, and vengeance.
Synopsis
Punctuated with one blisteringly violent and unpredictable twist after another, this pitch-perfect study of psychological terror spotlights two magnificent minds opposed in a no-holds-barred duel of cunning and depravity.
A master killer calling himself the Sandman is out for revenge. He's slaughtering not just one person at a time but whole families and whole neighborhoods, unleashing devastating explosions nationwide, and watching the horror unfold on a sophisticated network of surveillance cameras. No one knows why he is committing his crimes, or where he'll strike next.
But one man -- Jack Casey -- knows this: the Sandman wants him in the middle of the case, and wants him to suffer....
Jack was the FBI's top profiler until a psychopath's unspeakable crime shattered his life. Now Jack is starting over as a detective in a posh shoreline community outside Boston, and dating a beautiful woman who knows nothing about his shocking past. But the Sandman has found him, and his cutting-edge electronic devices are silently monitoring Jack's every move. Knowing that a showdown is imminent, Jack turns in desperation to Malcolm Fletcher -- a strange and brilliant fallen angel from the profiling unit. Fletcher is wanted by the FBI. And he possesses the key to unlocking the Sandman's demented mind.
As Jack Casey confronts evidence that the evil he's fighting may have emanated from his own side of the law, the Sandman's motivations begin to appear and a wild chase ensues. But while racing against time to save the next family, Jack is led deeper into the dark and terrifying tunnels of his fragile mind-a place where the Sandman awaits, to deal his final master stroke of vindictive cruelty.
Deviant Ways is a breathtaking and unforgettable first novel that catapults Chris Mooney into suspense fiction's highest ranks. A harrowing journey through ordinary streets turned into scenes of unimaginable terror, it careens from cries of mass murder to whispers within the mind-in a disturbing cat-and-mouse game of righteousness, loss, and vengeance.
Publishers Weekly
The familiar device of revenge killing is given horrific new twists in this gripping debut, as Mooney propels the reader into breathless suspense. The action kicks off with a literal bang: it's July 4 in Marblehead, Mass., where a serial killer, determined to erase evidence of a multiple slaying, sets off a bomb that wipes out several homes. Called in to investigate is Jack Casey, a former hotshot FBI profiler who's attempting to mend his shattered life as a detective on the Marblehead police force. Six years earlier, he watched, bound and drugged, while a madman killed his wife and unborn child. As the house bombings continue, Jack's assignment begins to undermine his sanity; recollections of the past crowd upon him, and his increasingly fragile condition threatens a current romantic relationship. Along the way Casey joins forces with the dark and fascinating Malcolm Fletcher, a renegade from the profiling department given to quoting Oscar Wilde, reading Le Morte d'Arthur in French and delivering the odd wisecrack ("I've seen your efforts. A high school freshman trying to unclasp a bra has a more polished approach"). Fascinating, too, is the novel's villain, the self-proclaimed Sandman, whose fiendish use of up-to-the-minute technology, for both surveillance and destruction, lends the novel some of its most distinctive details. Mooney's cinematic eye, unerring ear for vivid dialogue and deft touches of humanity--often interjected in moving counterpoint to the plot's malevolence--combine to turn this novel, despite some genre clich s (e.g., the traumatized cop), into a rousing read. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewThe Return of Chaos
Chris Mooney is a smart, resourceful young writer who has not yet fully assimilated his influences. On the one hand, his debut novel, Deviant Ways, is an overly familiar psycho-killer thriller that leans too heavily on the work of other writers, particularly Thomas Harris. On the other hand, it's a vital, frequently exciting novel, the clear product of a natural storyteller struggling to discover his own true voice.
The hero of Deviant Ways is Jack Casey, a lineal descendent of Red Dragon's Will Graham. Casey is a former FBI profiler whose career ended when a Lecter-like psychopath named Miles Hamilton murdered Casey's pregnant young wife. By the time the novel opens, Jack has tentatively reestablished the elements of a worthwhile life. He has fallen in love with a beautiful, successful photographer and now works as a police detective in the stress-free, upscale environs of Marblehead, Massachusetts. His peaceful existence and tenuous sense of emotional stability end abruptly when a stone-cold killer called the Sandman sets up shop in Marblehead.
The Sandman is an irreversibly damaged young man who murders entire families, then destroys all evidence through a series of massive, remote-controlled explosions. Casey's attempts to identify and capture the Sandman, and to understand his underlying motives, dominate the narrative, leading Casey to a series of near-fatal encounters: with the elusive Sandman, with a desperate cabal of renegade FBI agents who have secrets of their own, and with the darkest, most violent aspects of his own nature. In the course of a protracted manhunt that leads from Marblehead to rural Maine, Casey faces a multitude of debilitating memories, risks the loss of everything -- and everyone -- he loves, and finds himself forced, in the climactic chapters, to reenact the most devastating moments of his life.
Deviant Ways is a kitchen sink kind of novel that offers something for everyone: high-speed car chases, government conspiracies, primal confrontations, and breathless escapes, together with a vivid, convincing assortment of technological marvels. In spite of the familiarity of much of the material (such as the by now clichéd portrait of a-cop-who-can-think-like-a-psychopath), Mooney's novel gradually establishes a dramatic life of its own. In the end, it has something substantial to say about grief, trauma, madness, and abuse. For all its indebtedness to other books, Deviant Ways remains a compelling, sometimes powerful debut. It will be interesting to see where its gifted young author goes from here.
--Bill Sheehan