2008 - Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Nothing is as it seems in The Bodies Left Behind, Jeffrey Deaver's quintessential can't-put-it-down thriller about an off-duty cop who investigates an aborted 911 call from a secluded vacation home and ends up on the run. From the opening scene (that'll keep even the bravest of you at home with the doors locked and the shades drawn), Deaver delivers a clever page-turner that reads like one of his tightly plotted and fast-paced short stories (fans should check out Twisted). Endlessly surprising (there is more than one jaw-dropping plot twist) and supremely gripping (two hours after cracking this stand-alone thriller, I came up for air and took a moment to shake the cramp out of my fingers), The Bodies Left Behind is one of the most entertaining thrillers of the year.

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2008 - Stephen King - Just After Sunset !

In the introduction to his first collection of short fiction since Everything's Eventual (2002), King credits editing Best American Short Stories (2007) with reigniting his interest in the short form and inducing some of this volume's contents. Most of these 13 tales show him at the top of his game, molding the themes and set pieces of horror and suspense fiction into richly nuanced blends of fantasy and psychological realism. The Things They Left Behind, a powerful study of survivor guilt, is one of several supernatural disaster stories that evoke the horrors of 9/11. Like the crime thrillers The Gingerbread Girl and A Very Tight Place, both of which feature protagonists struggling with apparently insuperable threats to life, it is laced with moving ruminations on mortality that King attributes to his own well-publicized near-death experience. Even the smattering of genre-oriented works shows King trying out provocative new vehicles for his trademark thrills, notably N., a creepy character study of an obsessive-compulsive that subtly blossoms into a tale of cosmic terror in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. Culled almost entirely from leading mainstream periodicals, these stories are a testament to the literary merits of the well-told macabre tale.

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