THE DECEIVED
Brett Battles
Delacorte Press
Political Thriller
ISBN: 9780385341578
Brett Battles’s debut novel, 2007’s THE CLEANER, introduced a unique character in Jonathan Quinn. Quinn is a “cleaner,” who comes in to quickly, quietly and efficiently clean up a mess --- more often than not, one involving a body --- that someone else has made before it’s discovered. Battles probably could have turned a number of interesting, even intriguing, scenarios along just these lines into several novels before appreciably varying his theme. That he has chosen to throw an early change-up into THE DECEIVED, his sophomore work, is but one reason that it’s such a joy to read.
THE DECEIVED begins with Quinn on the scene of a rather grisly job. The setting is a busy Los Angeles shipping port, and the task is disposing of a body that has been in a shipping container for far too long. Accompanied by Nate, his apprentice, he takes the job in stride, at least until he discovers that the body he has been hired to get rid of is that of Steven Markoff, a man to whom he owes his life. Quinn is well aware that he cannot get emotionally involved in what he’s doing, yet he feels a debt of honor to Markoff that he can never fully repay.
Compelled to balance the scales for his murdered friend, Quinn tries to contact Jenny Fuentes, a woman with whom Markoff had a relationship. Fuentes, who works for James Guerrero, a maverick U.S. Congressman, has mysteriously taken a leave of absence, and everyone seems markedly secretive about her whereabouts. When Quinn visits her home in Houston, he finds that she is gone and narrowly escapes losing his own life in the process. He also meets Tasha, who identifies herself as a friend of Jenny’s and who believes that Jenny is in mortal danger as well.
Quinn’s quest for closure on Markoff’s behalf takes him to Washington, D.C. and then to Singapore, guided only by a series of numbers and letters that Markoff scrawled --- in his own blood --- on the inside of the shipping crate where he met his slow and painful end. Quinn and Nate are shadowed by a mysterious and deadly team who seems to have the ability to locate them at will, while they --- with assistance from Orlando, an enigmatic beauty from Quinn’s past --- doggedly retrace Markoff’s final days. What they discover, however, reaches far beyond Markoff’s murder into a plot whose goal is so far-reaching that it has the potential to change the course of current events.
THE DECEIVED is full of plot twists and surprises --- many more than its predecessor --- with the result being that the promise that Battles exhibited in THE CLEANER is met and far surpassed. His plotting is complex yet extremely sure-footed, so that the action never gets bogged down by the details (or vice versa). Most of what you think you know about the book by the time you are halfway through it is wrong, but Battles plays fairly throughout, avoiding the type of “Scooby-Doo” ending that occasionally plagues the denouement of novels in which the identity of the prime mover is cloaked in mystery. He also neatly sets up a potential conflict for Quinn that can sustain the series for several books to come.
All of these elements --- and more --- combine to make THE DECEIVED a certain contender for 2008’s Top Ten lists.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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