Three things are important to thriller writers: women's handbags, bad batteries and black holes. By black holes I mean those areas - usually rural or wilderness - with no mobile phone reception.

Otherwise, the best way to get an old-fashioned plot to work smoothly is to have the battery give up or a female heroine leave her phone in a handbag that gets lost.

In The Bodies Left Behind, Jeffery Deaver manages to employ most of these to ensure that Brynn McKenzie, his rural Wisconsin police deputy, and the young woman with whom she is destined to spend the night running for their lives are quickly parted from their main means of contact with the rest of the world.

Phones also have their uses, as when the coolly calculating killer hunting Brynn - and another even more coolly calculating who may be stalking him - use lost or stolen phones to elicit information or put rescuers off the scent.

Deaver's latest adrenalin dose is a standalone pulse-racer in the mould of A Maiden's Grave, the taut hostage drama that launched him into the mainstream.

It begins when Brynn, a feisty cop, answers a truncated emergency call from a lakeside holiday home. She gets there to find the murdered bodies of a top city lawyer and her husband and two armed hoodlums ready to kill her too.

After a narrow escape Brynn links up with Michelle, a timid and terrified actress, the dead couple's house-guest, who says that she walked in on the murder, shot and wounded one of the killers and is also now being hunted by them.

For the next dozen hours the two women are tracked and hunted through the national park, a world of almost impenetrable undergrowth, dangerous hidden precipices and rushing rivers in which the wild animals are far from the most dangerous creatures.

Brynn and Hart, the ruthless chief gunman, pit their wits against one another, laying false trails and employing reverse psychology that each in turn outthinks. But this is a Deaver novel, which ensures that there are more twists than even the most devious of his characters can imagine.

What appears to be a simple robbery gone wrong is actually a cynical chess move in a high-profile federal investigation involving criminal elements in local trade unions.

This is not just an adrenaline-charged manhunt but a game of deception and multiple double-cross that keeps the reader guessing right up to the final page.

The Bodies Left Behind by Jeffery Deaver
Hodder & Stoughton £17.99; 448pp Buy the book

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