For some reason, I thought I had started in on Jeffery Deaver’s third main protagonist series (his most famous being Lincoln Rhyme, of course, followed by Kathryn Dance), Colter Shaw, but apparently I hadn’t. Thus, 2021’s The Final Twist, marks my first time reading a Colter Shaw book. Normally, I would not like starting in what is essentially a sequel to a prior book, or without reading the book introducing the character first, but I didn’t realize that when I nabbed the book at a used book sale. Nonetheless, I don’t think I was missing anything. As with any series of books with a reoccurring character, the author does a good job catching up a first-time reader like myself on the character’s traits and personality and past events.
Colter Shaw’s character is similar to Rhyme and Dance in that he’s highly analytical, detail-oriented, and always has a plan in place, especially to ensnare the bad guys. Unlike Rhyme and Dance, his distinguishing quality is that he was raised by survivalist parents, who taught him everything he knows, and instead of parlaying that into law enforcement like the other two, he’s more of a “rewards” guy. That is, he helps find missing persons for the reward money. A small case like that happens in this book, and it’s actually quite compelling as a subplot of the book (and he doesn’t take the reward money because the family is poor), and then a minor character from that subplot is helpful to the main plot, but the actual plot of the book is about corporate espionage, corporate meddling, and “corporations as persons,” with Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision making it law that corporations as persons as a matter of free speech, acting as the deeper context.
The setting is the San Francisco, where two different billionaires with major companies and plenty of subsidiaries, are engaging in nefarious acts to take control of the government, not just in San Francisco, but the state of California itself (and maybe one day, the country). The first, BlackBridge, is engaging in a doping scheme, euphemistically called the Urban Improvement Plan, whereby on the surface, they appear to be helping developers locate prime real estate, but underneath, they’re intentionally plying the population with drugs, leading to overdoses, and then the developers could buy the area that had become “unlivable.” The second is a client of BlackBridge’s, Devereux, an arrogant womanizer, who uses subsidiaries to shield himself from liability, and one of his main acts is to frame his corporate competitors with environmental disasters by dumping toxins on their property surreptitiously.
But what Devereux is really after, and what he needs BlackBridge’s help with, is finding a document that an employer stole and hid away, and for which the company killed him over — and importantly, also killed Shaw’s dad, Ash, over, propelling Shaw on this mission to uncover whatever that employer hid away, same as his dad — and this document was signed by a judge just before the infamous 1906 earthquake that wiped out much of San Francisco and its people, including the judge. That document, though, essentially affirmed a vote tally in support of an amendment to the California Constitution to allow corporations to run for elected office and/or be appointed to elected office. However, in the wake of the quake, people forgot about it. Nonetheless, the way the law works in California, that amendment was, and more than 100 years later would still be, legally sound. (“A constitutional amendment does not need the Governor’s signature, but becomes part of the constitution only if the electorate approves it at the next general election.”) If Devereux can get his hands on it and bring it to light, then his hundreds of subsidiaries can run for political office and potentially oust current officeholders who ran afoul of the amendment.
The race is on then between Shaw, BlackBridge, and Devereux to find the elusive document. Fortunately for Shaw, he doesn’t have to do this alone: His older brother, Russell, who works for an unknown “group” that’s deeper and more connected with the government than even the CIA, joins him in the fight. There is a lot of unspoken tension between the brothers, not only because they haven’t seen each other since their father’s untimely death, but because Shaw suspected Russell of killing his dad after an argument over their younger sister. In any event, they work well as a team, both relying on what their dad taught them and their many years of training together. They basically outsmart BlackBridge’s team, resulting in the team members, including the CEO, being arrested and the company collapsing, and then eventually Devereux himself, by capturing the legitimate document, making a forgery, and then convincing the media and the public that the document is indeed a forgery and no such amendment ever passed in 1906. Then, it’s presumed that Russell kills Devereux.
Deaver is as clever as ever. Unlike his book I read last year, The Midnight Lock, which I was critical of for being too distracting with its research, Deaver’s trademark research and esoteric trivia asides don’t detract from the thrust of the novel itself, or the pacing of the plot. Instead, they were genuinely interesting, and at times, bolstered the plot. I just love that even the smallest of details and asides in Deaver’s novels surely had to have taken a great deal of research to mention. That’s why he’s been one of my favorite authors since my teen years, but also because, like I said, he’s extremely clever as a plotter. He’s not just a clever plotter, though, as he’s also come up with a third interesting character in Shaw, too. Sure, nobody can replace Rhyme for me, and I also like Dance more, but Shaw is an interesting character because of his survivalist background and his personal moral code to save others. He’s constantly thinking about ways not to harm innocent bystanders. That’s appreciated, obviously!
If you like Deaver’s other books, but haven’t taken a chance on the Shaw series, I would recommend jumping in like I did with, The Final Twist. I was enthralled by the ways in which — through Shaw — Deaver twisted me into knots with whether Shaw was going to one-up the bad guys (and he did, of course), and I think you will be, too.
Milam's Musings 