Abandoned: A Thriller [Mass Market Paperback]

Cody McFadyen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2010

For FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett, her colleague’s wedding is cause for celebration. Until a woman staggers down the aisle—incoherent, wearing only a white nightgown. A fingerprint check determines that she’s been missing for nearly eight years. Her coldly efficient captor toyed with her mind and body, imprisoning her, depriving her of any contact with the outside world. As Smoky fits together the pieces of what remains of the victim’s fractured life, a chilling picture emerges of a cerebral psychopath who doesn’t take murder personally, never makes a mistake, follows his own sinister logic, and has set the perfect trap.
 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cody McFadyen on Abandoned

I build my books around the bad guy. I have from the first. I remember making a conscious decision to build my bad guys a little bit outside the box--the box being the firm reality we all know and agree to be.

Why?

Because it’s a lot more fun to write about serial killers that way.

Think about it. Hannibal Lecter is a lot more interesting than Son of Sam. Hannibal is brilliant, complex, unclassifiable. He kills with finesse and precision. Son of Sam was an unhinged lunatic, blowing people away at random. As a character, Hannibal is much more interesting to write about (and read). Because true serial killers aren’t super villains. They’re disturbed, sordid individuals, driven by hungers and needs that usually destroy them from the inside out. A lot of the time, they’re socially inept, and not very smart. Their depravity is most often senseless. Writing about what they do would be like writing about a great white shark: it eats because it is hungry and it has such big sharp teeth... you can’t sustain an entire novel on pure savagery. So I like for my bad guys to have a reason for what they do, some guiding purpose. Otherwise, all I’m doing is asking you to pull up a chair and watch the feast--and while something in our reptile brains might enjoy seeing a little bit of the feast, we shy away from the full truth of it.

So when I started thinking about Abandoned, the fourth book in my series, I started by thinking about my killer. I wanted to do something different, but what? The killers in the books earlier in the series had all been pretty "hungry;" in other words, they were appetite driven. "So what," I thought, "about a killer with no appetite at all?"

I actually rejected it at first, but the idea kept swimming back to the forefront. There was something terrifying about the idea of someone operating with such cold clarity. It was haunting me--which is always a good sign! I thought about it a lot and finally realized what (for me at least) makes such a killer so chilling: that kind of coldness relegates us to nothing, nothing at all.

The killer who is purposefully cruel, the killer who drools with excitement, still needs our humanity, at whatever level. There is a validation of our value as sentient, emotional beings, even if that only means they need our fear and our horror. It’s a terrible kind of "mattering," but still, we matter.

In the world of the killer I envisaged, we don’t matter at all. There’s no intentional cruelty, no enjoyment of our suffering, no acknowledgement of the value of our existence. He assigns his victims numbers, because it’s a more economical use of oxygen than saying their names.

I saw him, he terrified me, and then I wrote him. He lies within the pages of Abandoned. It’s my hope he’ll terrify you as well.--Cody McFadyen

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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In McFadyen's intense fourth book to feature scarred FBI agent Smoky Barrett (after The Darker Side), a psychopath known as Dali abducts wives for men who wish to be rid of them, imprisons them for years in darkness and isolation (I'm just storing meat) until life insurance proceeds are paid to the husbands—then charges half the insurance for services rendered. Nonpaying husbands suffer excruciatingly painful blackmail. While Smoky, who heads the L.A. branch of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, is attending a friend's seaside wedding, a bald delirious woman is thrown out of a car, which speeds off. This incident leads to Smoky's own abduction, in which her sadistic captor forces her to choose her freedom on condition of what amounts to death for her young FBI colleague. McFadyen knows how to put readers into the minds of his characters, but many will need megawatt night-lights after finishing this violent psychological thriller. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (July 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553591347
• ISBN-13: 978-0553591347
• Product Dimensions: 4.1 x 1 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #133,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cody McFadyen lives in California. He is the author of The Darker Side, The Face of Death, and Shadow Man, which was an international bestseller.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The trip into the abyss is long and frightening...but worth taking, November 2, 2009

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Abandoned: A Thriller (Hardcover)

One of the staples of thriller literature is the deranged killer. The more imaginative authors are able to use these madmen to take their readers by the hand and nudge them to varying degrees in the direction of the abyss of madness. In some cases, it's a glance toward it; in others, a peek downward. And, in the most extreme, it's a push forward when you reach the edge. ABANDONED by Cody McFadyen goes a bit further, dragging you kicking and screaming to the chasm and then giving you a hearty two-handed shove.

While this is only McFadyen's fourth novel, his writing is possessed with a sureness and confidence that some veteran authors would kill for. This talent is beautifully displayed in ABANDONED, which features the return of Smoky Barrett. An FBI Special Agent, Smoky has had so much happen to her in McFayden's preceding volumes that the mere whisper of her presence is enough to cause familiar readers to cringe. Her family murdered and her face terribly scarred (not once, but twice), one fears what will happen to our heroine next. But somehow, she finds the strength to soldier on. And in ABANDONED, she finally has a chance at happiness: she is in a relationship with the quiet and capable --- and very deadly --- Tommy; she has Bonnie, her adopted daughter, who is everything one could wish for in a child; and, separate from this, she has two secrets, one she keeps with Tommy and the other from him.

While celebrating the wedding of Callie, her team member, Smoky receives an enigmatic text message followed shortly by the abrupt deposit of a seriously injured woman into the midst of the festivities. The woman, a police officer, had been missing for seven years and is unable to describe what has happened to her in her current condition. Smoky and her team begin an investigation, one that uncovers what appears to be a clandestine service run by a criminal mastermind who, for a significant fee, will make a troublesome wife disappear without a trace. That is, until such time as she can legally be declared dead and insurance proceeds can be collected. The provider of the service is detached, precise and amoral. And heaven help the man who reneges on the agreement.

Smoky precisely and methodically leads her team through the investigation, discovering similar occurrences as they slowly move in on the fiend. Then, just as they seem to be on the verge of honing in on him, the unthinkable happens. Smoky has to make a terrible choice, one that will change her and the team forever, even as the identity of the mastermind provides the biggest surprise of all.

I haven't lived what one could call a sheltered life by any stretch of the imagination, but McFadyen manages to make me cringe. Naturally, I loved every word, every sentence. McFadyen's storytelling prowess and plotting ability as displayed in ABANDONED would be enough to recommend it; however, he is also a remarkable writer who brings considerable literary skills to the desk. The result is a work that, while horrifying in (many) places, skillfully slices into and out of that which is life, good and bad. Be fairly warned: the trip into the abyss is long and frightening...but worth taking.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars McFadyen Is Too Good A Writer To Write A Bad Book But Abandoned Is Far From This Author's Best!, November 25, 2009

By 

bobbewig (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Abandoned: A Thriller (Hardcover)

Without going into detail about the plot (especially since some of the other reviews have given away too much of what happens), let me just say that in Abandoned McFadyen has created a killer who doesn't kill for thrills, sex or even for power -- it's far more twisted than that. The concept of this plot is quite complex, and McFadyen succeeds quite well in executing the plot in the first quarter and last quarter of the book. During these parts of the book the story is intense and had me on the edge of my seat. However, I found that the second and third quarters of Abandoned dragged on with insufficient action and thrills being provided. Further, while McFadyen continued to provide this reader with a deeper understanding into the psyche of his main character, FBI special agent Smokey Barrett, and into his psychopathic killer, McFadyen gave short shrift in Abandoned to several of the key supporting characters that helped make his previous three books so memorable for me (i.e., Shadow Man, The Face Of Death and A Darker Place). As such, I'd strongly recommend to anyone considering reading Abandoned and who has not previously read at least one of Mcfadyen's other books, that they first read at least Shadow Man in order to begin to understand and to develop an appreciation of McFadyen's richly developed characters. I don't believe a new reader will get this sense of appreciation from beginning with Abandoned, and will probably not care much about the characters that were so richly developed in McFadyen's other books (e.g., Callie Thorne, Alan Washington, James Giron, etc.); which, in turn, will lessen their overall appreciation of the book. In net, while Abandoned has its flaws and while it is the weakest of McFadyen's four thrillers, it is still a book well worth reading.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars See What Nearly Made Me Throw Up - No, Not the Violence or Gore, March 10, 2010

By 

Rapid Reader (Orlando) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Abandoned: A Thriller (Hardcover)

Parts of this book were compelling, but all in all, not the best writing. Here are 3 things I didn't like: First, all the drawn out detail about the internet blogging was extremely boring and unnecessary. This occurred in the middle of the book and dragged the story down to the point where I almost stopped reading. Second, I detest endings where the captured villian spills their guts and tells you all the motivation and planning behind their actions in minute detail. Not only would this not happen, it's cheating on the part of the author who doesn't have the skill to finish the story in a more credible fashion. And third, if the character Callie called one more person "Honey Love", I think I would have thrown up. Gosh dang, what bad writing. This book didn't work for me at all. I barely managed to finish it (hoping for a better ending), but will not read another Cody McFadyen. I give this one and a half stars.