Customer Reviews
Deadline is Fine - By: Mr. John Frank Herbert, 12 Oct 2008 
The fourteen year old daughter has been kidnapped, the husband has disappeared, & the mother's got 48 hours to find half a million pounds.
An interesting kidnap story that never reaches great heights, but you want to know what happens.
Holds your attention throughout - By: Julia Flyte, 30 Sep 2008 
Simon Kernick writes books that start like a Bugatti Veyron, going from 0 to 100 in 6 seconds flat. Deadline is an excellent, well paced thriller that will grab & hold your attention from the very first chapter, when Andrea Devern arrives home to find her husband & daughter missing. Almost immediately she received a phone calll telling her that her daughter has been kidnapped. Is her husband involved? Who can she turn to for help? What should she do now?
When I read the synopsis of this book I thought that it was going to be a lot like Kernick's previous novel, Relentless, which also opens with a missing spouse, but it's actuallly quite different (although both feature policeman Mike Bolt). I reallly liked Relentless, but I think that this a better written novel. One thing I liked about Deadline was that I never knew where it was going to go - even quite close to the end, I had no idea how it would wrap up. I thought I'd been terribly clever spotting clues along the way, but it turned out that most of those were red herrings! Mike Bolt is a likeable main character & I hope that he'll make another appearance in another Kernick novel soon.
Kernick does seem to have one problem as an author & that is ending his books. He tends to rush his endings & tries too hard to make them too neat. This was the big flaw with Relentless. Here he makes the same error, but he does redeem it somewhat with a final epilogue that works well. However he also opens the book with a totallly unnecessary prologue, which never gets successfully integrated back into the plot. Why Simon, why? Thankfully, the 300 odd pages in between are terrific.
Very enthralling and entertaining - story was too far fetched though - By: Mr. Yasin Mustafa, 18 Sep 2008 I reallly enjoyed reading this book; you know there's gonna be a twist at the end & that keeps keeps you glued. I missed my tube stop because I was so involved.
Having finished the book though I feel a little disappointed, there were too many coincidences. Some things are just too far fetched. Don't want to give away any spoilers, but the case is solved far too conveniently.
Nevertheless, a good entertaining read.
gripping read - By: Mr. M. G. Richards, 11 Sep 2008 
this is the first simon kernick book that i have read & i will definatly be buying some more.i read Deadline over two days & it was so gripping that i stayed up till the early hours last night because i just had to finish it
from the first page right up to the end the story draws you in & you just have to keep on reading no matter how often you say to yourself just one more chapter.
if you have children then you can sympathise with Andrea Devern although you cant reallly tell if she is involved with the kidnapping or not because some of the things that she does are very questionable.i also liked the Mike Bolt character,a man who was trying his hardest to do his job who at the same time had alll this pressure building up inside him,it was very easy to feel sympathy for him.
altogether a very exciting & gripping thriller that i would recommend to anyone who enjoys a good book
Ever heard of editing? - By: John Power, 06 Sep 2008 
I had heard good things.
But this at nearly 500 pages lost suspense through paper thin dialogue & formulaic relationships occuring.
I am sorry, the ultimate insult this, to say I gave up half way.
An arduous read, characters I couldn't care less about coupled with unimaginative prose & narrative.
To calll him 'an English Harlan Coben' is an insult on the evidence of this book.
