New York Times Bestseller Christopher Reich spins this international espionage story into a mind-twisting thriller.  His second book, THE PATRIOT’S CLUB, was honored by International Thriller Writers as the BEST NOVEL in 2006. 

Christopher Reich’s writing craft is smooth.  Powerful.   If you dissect his writing like a Deep Editing graduate, you’ll see dozens of psychologically-driven examples that make his thrillers unputdownable.  He uses visceral responses sparingly, when the stakes are rising, and when the scene climaxes. Smart – and effective.  Here’s a taste of what Reich did right.

EXAMPLE:  Page 29: 

Fear rose from deep inside him, crawling upward through his stomach, gathering speed and strength, gutting his discipline and strangling the calm, reasonable voice.  The dark.  The pressure. The failing air.  He was overcome by a full-throated terror.  He opened his mouth to scream and sucked down a torrent of snow and ice.

ANALYSIS:  Did you catch the visceral response to fear used as a stimulus to gut his discipline and strangle an internal voice?  It’s a sophisticated way to add power to a visceral response. 

What else did he power up?  Cadence.  Two and three word sentence fragments.  Power words.  Backloaded sentences. 

It’s a dream.  An emotional gut-stabbing dream.  Here’s what comes a few lines down:

EXAMPLE:  Page 29, 30:

She’s gone.

It came over him slowly, like an approaching storm.  His breath quickened.  His fingertips began to tingle.  Something sharp and cold tore into his stomach and forced him to bend double at the waist.  He sobbed.

She’s gone.

The words played over in his mind as images of her body lying alone abandoned in the frozen darkness tormented him.

Finally, a measure of calm returned.  His breathing slowed.  The terror passed, but he knew it wasn’t gone for good.  He could feel it lurking nearby, waiting.

ANALYSIS:  Those five paragraphs consist of a combination of VISCERAL RESPONSES, POWER INTERNALIZATIONS, and what I labeled, THE RECOVERY.  Most writers neglect sharing the POV character’s physical and emotional recovery. 

Notice his use of white space and creative paragraphing.  Read it out loud.  Hear the cadence?  Did you pick up the power words?  Storm.  Sharp. Cold. Tore. Forced.  Sobbed.  Alone.  Abandoned. Frozen.  Darkness. Tormented. Terror. Lurking.

He loaded that 88 word passage with THIRTEEN power words.  That’s 15% power words – and all are SCENE-THEMED.

Each time I present a full day master class, when I emphasize Power Words, writers struggle.  They can’t find many power words in their chapters. 

Given the passage I used is emotionally loaded, we’d expect some power words.  Christopher Reichs packed that passage with tons of psychological dynamite to hook the reader viscerally.

The next example is a sequel.  It carries power and power words too:

EXAMPLE:  Page 33

A current of longing seized him.  A current so powerful that it threatened to grow into a panic.  Panic at his permanent, inconsolable loss.

ANALYSIS:  Power Words – Gone. Longing. Seized. Powerful. Threatened.  Panic.  Panic. Permanent.  Inconsolable.  Loss.

Out of 24 words, ten were power words – and scene-themed.  Often, we have only two or three power words per page. 

If you’ve taken my Deep Editing course, the one with 25 rhetorical devices, you may have noticed two rhetorical devices in the passage above.  The first one I call a DOUBLE.  Christopher Reich intentionally echoed the lead-in of two consecutive sentences.  The second rhetorical effect he used was ending a sentence with a power word, PANIC, and kicking off the next sentence with the same power word, PANIC.

Using that rhetorical device (anadiplosis) empowers the cadence, empowers the message, and empowers the emotion.  It locks-in the emotion on the page, and locks-in the emotion for the reader.

I could share a hundred more strong examples from RULES OF DECEPTION.  Here’s one final quickie visceral:

EXAMPLE:  Page 258:  As he stared at the numbers, an uncomfortable cold burrowed in his stomach.

ANALYSIS:  It’s the type of line you read and keep going.  It doesn’t seem special.  But – Christopher Reich didn’t settle for trite.  He didn’t write:  HIS HEART POUNDED.  He didn’t write:  HIS STOMACH TWISTED INTO A KNOT.  He gave the reader a fresh basic.  Fresh writing is a boost toward the NYT list.

RULES OF DECEPTION earned its spot on the NYT bestseller list.  Stellar writing craft in a chiller of a thriller.