Jeffery Deaver - The Goodbye Man

NOVELS

The Colter Shaw Series

The Never Game

The Lincoln Rhyme Series

The Cutting Edge

The Burial Hour

The Steel Kiss

The Skin Collector

The Kill Room

The Burning Wire

The Broken Window

The Cold Moon

The Twelfth Card

The Vanished Man

The Stone Monkey

The Empty Chair

The Coffin Dancer

The Bone Collector

The Kathryn Dance Series

Solitude Creek

XO

Roadside Crosses

The Sleeping Doll

The Rune Series

Hard News

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Manhattan Is My Beat

The John Pellam Series

Hell’s Kitchen

Bloody River Blues

Shallow Graves

Stand-Alones

The October List

No Rest for the Dead (Contributor)

Carte Blanche (A James Bond Novel)

Watchlist (Contributor)

Edge

The Bodies Left Behind

Garden of Beasts

The Blue Nowhere

Speaking in Tongues

The Devil’s Teardrop

A Maiden’s Grave

Praying for Sleep

The Lesson of Her Death

Mistress of Justice

SHORT FICTION

Collections

Ice Cold (Editor)

A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor)

Trouble in Mind

Triple Threat

Books to Die For (Contributor)

The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor)

More Twisted

Twisted

Individual Stories

Buried

The Second Hostage

Verona

The Debriefing

Ninth and Nowhere

Captivated

The Victims’ Club

Surprise Ending

Double Cross

The Deliveryman

A Textbook Case

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2020

First published in the US in 2020 by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Gunner Publications, LLC 2020

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2020

Cover photographs © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images (figure), © Tim Gartside / Trevillion Images (forest), © Shutterstock.com(all other images)

Jeffery Deaver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008303785

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008303808

Version: 2021-01-27

For Jane Davis, with boundless gratitude

What a journey I have made, the things I have seen … Give me a jug of water and human flesh. Give me air to breathe and a strong sailing wind when I rise from the underworld.

BOOK OF THE DEAD, EGYPTIAN FUNERARY TEXT

Contents

Cover

Also by Jeffery Deaver

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

One: The Man on the Cliff

Chapter 1. June 11, 2 p.m.

Chapter 2. June 11, 8 a.m., six hours earlier

Chapter 3

Chapter 4. June 11, 2 p.m., present time

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Two: The Best Is Yet to Come

Chapter 18. June 15

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28. June 16

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47. June 17

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Three: Echo Ridge

Chapter 72. June 20

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80. June 21

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83. June 22

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Read on for an exclusive sneak peak at the new Colter Shaw thriller from the master of suspense Jeffery Deaver – The Final Twist

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

Seconds to decide.

Swerve left? Swerve right?

A steep drop into brush? Or a narrow shoulder that ends in a cliff wall?

Left.

Instinct.

Colter Shaw spun the wheel of the rental Kia sedan hard, braking intermittently—he couldn’t afford a skid. The vehicle, which had been doing forty along this stretch in high mountains, plunged into foliage, narrowly missing a collision with the boulder that had tumbled down a steep hillside and rolled into the middle of the road before him. Shaw thought the sound of a two-hundred-pound piece of rock rolling through brush and over gravel would be more dramatic; the transit was virtually silent.

Left was the correct choice.

Had he gone right, the car would have slammed into a granite outcropping hidden by tall, beige grass.

Shaw, who spent much time assessing the percentage likelihood of harm when making professional decisions, nonetheless knew that sometimes you simply had to roll the dice, and see what happened.

No air bags, no injury. He was, however, trapped inside the Kia. To his left was a sea of mahonia, otherwise known as Oregon grape, benign names both, belying the plant’s needle-sharp spikes that can penetrate cloth on their effortless way into skin. Not an option for an exit. The passenger side was better, blocked only by insubstantial cinquefoil, in cheerful June bloom, yellow, and a tangle of forsythia.

Shaw shoved the right-side door open again and again, pushing back the viney plants. As he did this, he noted that the attacker’s timing had been good. Had the weapon fallen sooner, Shaw could easily have braked. Any later, he’d have been past it and still on his way.