by Jeffery Deaver
standalone crime thriller novel
published 1995
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The ultimate thriller writer’s first large-scale, ticking clock standalone thriller. An escaped convict takes hostage a bus of deaf children. He will kill one an hour …
Three convicts escape from a state prison in Kansas and the horror begins when they intersect with a school bus carrying deaf students and two teachers on a lonely road. They’re trapped in an abandoned slaughterhouse while federal and state law enforcement surround them and hostage negotiations ensue.
A school bus carrying eight deaf school-girls and their teachers brakes suddenly on a flat Kansas highway. They should never have stopped. Waiting for them are three heartless men just escaped from prison — each with nothing to lose. And now, with the girls as their hostages, they have everything to gain. They make their stand in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and it is there that Lou Handy, a murderer and the convicts’ ringleader, announces his terms: to kill one captive an hour unless his demands are met.
FBI Hostage Negotiator Arthur Potter is called to the scene, and asks the criminals their demands. The leader of the Hostage takers, Lou Handy, is demanding a helicopter, and is promising to kill one hostage every hour until Potter complies.
What follows is a twelve-hour siege of noose-tight tension — and a war of nerves between Handy and the FBI’s senior hostage negotiator, Arthur Potter.
Dead Silence, based on A Maiden’s Grave, was made into a movie, starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin. It was filmed by HBO in 1997.
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