The Maze by Nelson DeMille

The Maze by Nelson DeMille is about the real-life Gilgo Beach murders. I’ve read other books by this author and really enjoyed them, so I decided to read this one. The first book I read by this author was The Lion. I enjoyed it so much and that is when I got hooked on all of Nelson DeMille’s books. I love how the author takes real events and creates a story around them. It makes you wonder which facts are true and what is made up.

The Maze Synopsis

At the beginning of The Maze, the author recaps John Corey’s love life and past jobs. I’m glad the author included this because I either haven’t read the previous books about John Corey, or I read them a long time ago and don’t remember the details. The Maze is the last of the John Corey books.

The book is mostly dialogue and John’s thoughts. We only see the story through John’s eyes.

John Corey is a retired homicide detective with a three-quarter disability. He is spending time at his uncle’s summer house after being injured on the job. He’s contemplating what to do now that he is not working. Then Detective Beth Penrose, his ex-girlfriend, comes to him and offers him a job as a private investigator at Security Solutions. She said Max, another former colleague, asked her to inform John to apply for the job.

In the first part of the book, Beth and Max try to convince John to take the job, but John does not want the job. Beth also incentivizes him by saying that John can live at her place while working for the summer at Security Solutions. He likes that idea because he is still attracted to Beth.

John finally accepts the job, and then Beth tells him why she and Max wanted him to take the job. It involves a missing person and murder, which is a cold case. Beth and Max were on the case and tried to solve it, but their superiors told them to stop investigating. They think they know who murdered all the prostitutes, and they need John to get the evidence.

My Analysis

The story in The Maze by Nelson DeMille goes really slow. The first part of the book, where Beth and Max were trying to convince John to take a private investigator’s job at Security Solutions, took over 100 pages before John finally accepted the job. There was no action.

It’s not a book that I wanted to hurry up and start reading again because I was excited to see what happens next in the story. However, it was interesting enough that I continued reading. If a book does not interest me, I do not feel a need to read it to the end. I move on to the next book.

John refers back to the Plum Island case often. That was the case John and Beth were involved with in another book in the series. I never read the book, so I didn’t know what they were talking about. But it didn’t matter because it didn’t have an impact on this story. I just didn’t know why the author had to bring it up so much.

I thought The Maze would involve more detective work. It’s about a cold case that has already been investigated. They just could not arrest anyone. There was nothing for the reader to think about or to make assumptions about who did it, how they did it, or why.

I didn’t mind too much that the whole book was John’s conversations and thoughts. It just didn’t make the book too exciting to read. I never read a book like that before. I’ve read books from one character’s point of view, but not every word is from one person.

Overall, this is an okay book to read, especially if you are a John Corey fan. I like other John Corey books, but this is not a favorite book of mine.