Illustrated with the author’s own eerie photographs, the chapters that follow move back in time to 8:20 a.m. But when the woman opens the door, expecting to see the girl’s rescuers, the visitor turns out to be the kidnapper - and he has a gun. Here’s the ending (which comes, of course, at the beginning), every word of it true: It’s 6:30 on a Sunday night and a woman and a man she trusts are alone in a Manhattan apartment anxiously awaiting news of her kidnapped 6-year-old daughter. The reader is never lied to in Deaver’s brilliant shell game, merely misdirected, and the best part of this trick is that despite being in on the game, we continue to make false assumptions. Let’s admit that the prose is a bit flat, and the characters lack nuance, the unavoidable consequence of withholding key information about persons and motives until those last (first!) five chapters give it all up. Taking inspiration from Kierkegaard (“Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward”), the devious author begins his story with Chapter 36 and methodically works his way back to Chapter 1. (Oct.The temptation to read THE OCTOBER LIST (Grand Central, $26) backward - which is to say, forward - must be resisted, or you’ll hate yourself for spoiling what might well be Jeffery Deaver’s most fiendish thriller ever. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents. This is brilliant craftsmanship in a vastly entertaining package. The finished picture finally emerges with a shock of recognition. As the ingenious plot folds back on itself, the reader has to reevaluate and reinterpret the constantly shifting “facts” in the case. Gabriela must not only pay a $500,000 ransom but also fork over the mysterious “October List,” which belongs to her former boss Charles Prescott, the head of Prescott Investments, who has fled from a police investigation.

In the first chapter, office manager Gabriela McKenzie, whose six-year-old daughter, Sarah, has been kidnapped, waits in her Manhattan apartment for news from fund manager Daniel Reardon, who’s attempting to deal with kidnapper Joseph Astor. Thriller Award–winner Deaver (Edge) delivers a clever, demanding stand-alone that moves backward in time over the span of a three-day weekend, from Sunday evening to early Friday morning.

The October List by Jeffery Deaver