Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia, the compassionate detective in this morally complex series, is no big brain, and he knows it. But as the pace quickens and the story continues to backtrack, solid evidence, established plot points and sturdily built characters all begin to come undone, until what started out as an interactive game becomes a truly unnerving exercise in deception. Watching a chase scene, or even a love scene, played out of sequence is pure fun, especially when the complications (which include a knife-wielding character who’s actually called “the complication”) begin to pile up. In the beginning (the end?), it seems like a straightforward narrative about a woman named Gabriela McKenzie who innocently finds herself in possession of a document, the mysterious “October List,” that means nothing to her but has made her the target of ruthless criminals. on Friday, when the plot machinery was first set in motion. Illustrated with the author’s own eerie photographs, the chapters that follow move back in time to 8:20 a.m. But when the woman opens the door, expecting to see the girl’s rescuers, the visitor turns out to be the kidnapper - and he has a gun. Here’s the ending (which comes, of course, at the beginning), every word of it true: It’s 6:30 on a Sunday night and a woman and a man she trusts are alone in a Manhattan apartment anxiously awaiting news of her kidnapped 6-year-old daughter. The reader is never lied to in Deaver’s brilliant shell game, merely misdirected, and the best part of this trick is that despite being in on the game, we continue to make false assumptions. Let’s admit that the prose is a bit flat, and the characters lack nuance, the unavoidable consequence of withholding key information about persons and motives until those last (first!) five chapters give it all up.

Taking inspiration from Kierkegaard (“Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward”), the devious author begins his story with Chapter 36 and methodically works his way back to Chapter 1. The temptation to read THE OCTOBER LIST (Grand Central, $26) backward - which is to say, forward - must be resisted, or you’ll hate yourself for spoiling what might well be Jeffery Deaver’s most fiendish thriller ever.

The October List by Jeffery Deaver