A Maiden's Grave
Jeffrey Deaver, 1995
Penguin Group USA
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451204295
Summary
Eight vulnerable girls and their helpless teachers are forced off a school bus and held hostage. The madman who has them at gunpoint has a simple plan: one hostage an hour will die unless the demands are met.
Called to the scene is Arthur Potter, the FBI's best hostage negotiator. He has a plan. But so does one of the hostages—a beautiful teacher who's willing to do anything to save the lives of her students. Now, the clock is ticking as a chilling game of cat and mouse begins. (From the publisher.)
The 1997 HBO-TV film adaption of the novel, titled Dead Silence, stars James Garner and Marlee Matlin.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 6, 1950
• Where—Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri; J.D., Fordham
University
• Awards—Nero Wolf Award; Steel Dager and Short Story
Dagger from Brittish Crime Writers' Assn.; Ellery Queen
Reader's Award for Best Short Story (3 times); Thumping
Good Read Award (British); Book of the Year by Mystery
Writers' Assn. of Japan; Grand Prix Award by Japanese
Adventure Fiction Assn.
• Currently—N/A
Jeffery Deaver is an American mystery/crime writer. He originally started working as a journalist, but trained as a lawyer and later practised law.
Many of Deaver's books tend to promote lateral thinking, particularly his short story collection Twisted. One of his books, The Blue Nowhere, features criminal hackers (one using social engineering to commit murder), as well as a law enforcement computer crime unit.
His most popular series features his regular character Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective, and Amelia Sachs. According to a 2006 interview on The Early Show, Deaver said he would rotate between his new series and Lincoln Rhyme each year. Virtually all of his works feature a trick ending, or sometimes multiple trick endings.
Deaver edited The Best American Mystery Stories 2009.
Two of Deaver's novels have been produced into films: The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie (in 1999), and A Maiden's Grave as the HBO film Dead Silence with James Garner and Marlee Matlin (in 1997).
Deaver also created the characters and—in a collaboration with 14 other noted writers—wrote the 17-part serial thriller The Chopin Manuscript narrated by Alfred Molina that was broadcast on Audible.com from September 25th to November 13, 2007.
Deaver was chosen as author of the newest James Bond novel (May, 2011), known as Project X, which is set in the present era and published in May of 2011. He is the second American author to write Bond novels, after Raymond Benson. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It's said that great minds think alike; apparently great thriller writers do too. Here's the second outstanding novel in as many months to see a busload of schoolchildren kidnapped by maniacs. The first was Mary Willis Walker's Under the Beetle's Cellar (Forecasts, June 12); Deaver's is equally gripping, with the added twist that these kids are deaf. In rural Kansas, an act of kindness launches a nightmare when Mrs. Harstrawn, along with hearing-impaired apprentice teacher Melanie Charrol, stops her busload of deaf schoolgirls at a car wreck, only to be taken hostage by Lou Handy and two other stone-cold killers who've just escaped from prison. Pursued by a state trooper, the captors race with their prey to an abandoned slaughterhouse. There, Arthur Potter, the FBI's foremost hostage negotiator, sets up a command post-but the nightmare intensifies when Handy releases one girl, then shoots her in the back just as she reaches the agent. After further brutalities, Melanie decides to rescue her students herself, tricking the killers with sign language games to convey her plan to her charges. Meanwhile, pressure mounts on Potter as the media get pushy, the local FBI stonewalls, Kansas State hostage rescue units try an end run to grab the glory and an assistant attorney general butts in. Deaver (Praying for Sleep) brilliantly conveys the tensions and deceit of hostage negotiations; he also proves a champion of the deaf, offering poetic insight into their world. Throughout, heartbreakingly real characters keep the wildly swerving plot from going off-track, even during the multiple-whammy twists that bring the novel, Deaver's best to date, to its spectacular finish.
Publishers Weekly
A bus carrying eight deaf children and their teachers stops in the middle of the Kansas countryside, a car wreck directly ahead. Soon, three escaped killers rise out of the nearby cornfields and take children and teachers hostage. Pursued by the police, the convicts are forced to hole up in an abandoned slaughterhouse. There they threaten to shoot a child every hour until their demands are met. A 12-hour war of wits begins between FBI hostage expert Arthur Potter and the escapees' leader, Louis Jeremiah Handy. "I aim to get outta here. ...If it means I gotta shoot 'em dead as posts then that's the way it's gonna be," Handy boasts. Potter finds himself "in the middle of the week's media big bang," battling publicity-hungry politicians, trigger-happy cops, and the press as well as the unpredictable killers. This book by the best-selling author of Praying for Sleep (1994) starts with a bang, and the tension never lets up. A topnotch thriller with an unexpected kicker at the end. —David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus
Library Journal
Eight students and two teachers from a school for the deaf are kidnapped on a remote Kansas highway by three murderous escaped convicts.... In Arthur Potter, [the author] introduces a sympathetic and human hero, a complex, moralistic man who can only succeed at his craft by befriending the vilest criminals and then betraying them. Deaver has also succeeded in making his deaf characters vivid individuals, without a hint of patronizing
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for A Maiden's Grave:
1. Jeffrey Deaver did a great deal of research into the world of deaf people. How convincing is his treatment of their world? What most surprised...and/or impressed you by some of his revelations?
2. A strong bond exists among people in the deaf community, yet there are also serious divisions. Talk about that divisiveness. Whom do you side with?
3. Why might Deaver have chosen a slaughterhouse as the setting for A Maiden's Grave? What affect does it have on your reading of the novel?
4. Talk about the villains of the story, especially Lou Handy. How would you describe him? Is there anything to admire in him? What about his cohorts, Wilcox and Bonner?
5. Discuss the method of hostage negotiations portrayed in the book. What is the standard strategy?
6. Talk about Arthur Potter. What do you think of his character—and his technique as a hostage negotiator? Is he right to take the risks he does? Why does he refer to the hostages as nearly dead—to the situation as a homocide-in-progress? What about his befriending of Handy? Is he a moral man?
7. What do you think of Melanie Charrol and her efforts to avert disaster? How do she and Potter develop feelings for one another...when their only "contact" has been a single glimpse and a mouthed message?
8 What are your feelings toward the hostages, especially, say, Donna Hawstrawn, or Susan, Kielle and Shannon? Does Deaver do a good job of portraying frightened young girls? What about the decision to take matters into their own hands—how did you feel about that? And why do the girls repeat lines of the poem they were to deliver at the recital?
9. What are the conflicts of interest between the various factions of law enforcement officials, politicians, and media? In what ways do they actually endanger the girls' lives? Do you think Deaver has described their competing interests authentically?
10. What is the significance of the novel's title?
11. Does this book deliver in terms of suspense and excitement? Were you surprised by all the twists and turns—or did you find them predictable? How about Deaver's last minute roller coaster ride? Is the ending satisfying? And, finally, what about character development—does Deaver adequately develop his characters in a book dependent on plot?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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