Four-five rocks!

Author: Jeffrey Deaver
Book Review on the book:

“The Vanished Man”


Phew… took me over 2 whole weeks to finish this book, though the actual time taken with estimation is only about 6 hours, perhaps.

Finally, today I mustered enough willpower and concentration in my mind to finish 300+ page in the around 5 hours of reading. Yeah yeah, I know it’s pretty slow.

Anyway, here’s the review:

It’s a story about a illusionist that uses his knowledge of illusion to perform magic tricks such as the “Burning Mirror” and many more by famous magicians such as Houdini, the only problem is that his “volunteers” did not volunteer and they won’t survive the performances. That guy is one big screw loose; he had all these performances planned for a few years, in order to take revenge for his mentor against the manager who fired his mentor and him due to their dangerous performances in the circus years ago. His mentor and the manager had a dispute about the dangerous performance they often put up and got a little physical. While they were scuffling, they accidentally ignited the propane wire of the setup, causing an explosion to occur at the circus. His master died a few weeks later due to the burn injuries. As for the circus, it closed down but only to reopen in a new name after a year by the same boss and manager.

It was a big challenge for the police since this guy uses many tricks and always plan out his act of killing and route of escape too well, leaving hardly any evidence and those “evidence” left behind were meant to mislead the police. The police had to bring in their own magician and experts to outwit this screw loose serial killer. With many talents such as lock picking, ventriloquism, body-reading and more, he made many narrow escapes. Not even the detention centre could hold him down, unlocking handcuffs and shackles in less than 4 seconds with quick change of clothes in 10 seconds, even the police officers were fooled by his disguise and beneath that disguise was another disguise only to be revealed at the end that he was pretending to be his mentor

His crimes eventually were thought to be figured out by the detectives and criminologist that it was to mislead them to thinking he wanted revenge at the manager instead of him breaking Andrew Constable, the leader of a racist organization, out of jail. But the criminologist managed to detect the misdirection in time and saved the circus which at that time has more than 2000 audience within it watching the show and the manager himself.

The screw loose was eventually out-witted, caught and unmasked. Being brought to justice, the illusionist understood his mistakes in his misdirection through the explanation of the criminologist.

My opinion:

Overall it was good ~.
It brings you into the world of magic, keeping you engage constantly. There are many twists in the story and the lives and background of the police and many experts were explained as the story goes on, allowing the reader to understand more about the characters and what made them who they are today. It also unveiled the cruel of reality, such as a priest who took advantage of a 13-year-old girl to have oral sex and plans to wipe out Asians, Hispanic, Blacks and Non-Christians by a racist organization in the name of god.

If it were to be rated, I believe it would be rated PG. This is due to some vulgarity and sexual content, though not too detailed. But the words used such “Fxxx” showed the feeling of anger and intenseness of the characters while they crack their brains to try and solve the case of homicide. Humorous was injected into the story too; such the SWAT team which originally stands for “Special Weapon And Tactic” became “Saving the Witnesses’ @ss Team”. Many expressions were used to describe the feelings, showing how they feel and the facial description gave you the image in your mind, thus you could imagine the whole scenario with the conversation between the characters.

FINALLY finished my 1st book...
1 more book and 4 more newspaper reports to go *headaches*
~Joseph~