The hero of Jeffery Deaver's thriller The Bone Collector is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic scientist known to his peers as "the world's foremost criminalist". Rhyme will need all his reason--and his considerable stock of high-tech tools--about him to solve this latest brain-twister: a serial killer with method to his madness. In tried and true thriller fashion, the killer's crimes are described in lurid detail, as is the astounding technological equipment with which Rhyme examines the evidence--everything from an energy-dispersive x-ray unit to a mass spectrometer.Every fictional detective has his or her gimmick, from Sherlock Holmes's violin to Nero Wolf's orchids, and Rhyme is no exception. He is a quadriplegic who can move nothing but a single finger. Gadget-philes will be in seventh heaven reading about Lincoln Rhyme's tools; other readers might feel the book could do with a few more plausible characters and a little less technology. --Amazon.com
Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs Series
The series follows brilliant forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, detective Amelia Sachs, as they solve complex crimes using scientific methods and deductive reasoning. Their stories often take place in New York and involve thrilling chases and psychological drama. Rhyme, who is paralyzed, relies on Sachs to assist him in the field. Together, they face various dangerous adversaries and uncover dark secrets.
Recommended Reading Order
The Coffin Dancer, America's most wanted hit man, is back. He's been hired by an airline owner who wants three witnesses taken care of before his trial, and has got the first, a pilot, by blowing up his entire plane. Enter quadriplegic ex-cop Lincoln Rhyme, who can find forensic evidence to hang a man in the smallest debris, and his assistant Amelia Sachs. Their job is to keep the remaining two witnesses safe, and to find the Coffin Dancer before he finds them. Because he will find them, and anyone else who tries to get in his way.
The Empty Chair
- 496 pages
- 18 hours of reading
Lincoln Rhyme has travelled to a world-famous spinal cord injuries center in North Carolina for some risky, experimental surgery. It may make him a tiny bit better, it may kill him. But before he has a chance to undergo it, the local police department are drafting in Rhyme and Amelia, using their forensic skills to help find two women kidpapped by a psychotic young man known locally as the Insect Boy. After a cat and mouse game through the abandoned swamps of North Carolina, Lincoln and Amelia manage to find him - then Amelia, convinced of his innocence, breaks the boy out of jail. And Lincoln has to find them both, while Amelia uses all the skills her mentor and lover has taught her to evade him. Her actions are to have more disastrous consequence than either of them anticipate . . .
The Stone Monkey
- 448 pages
- 16 hours of reading
Lincoln and Amelia are recruited to track down a cargo ship carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as Youling - the Ghost. But when the capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who have vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of New York City's Chinese community. Over the next forty-eight hours the Ghost ruthlessly hunts for the families while Rhyme, aided by a policeman from mainland China, struggles to find them before they die and Sachs pursues a very different kind of policework - forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may have consequences going to the core of her relationship with her partner and lover, Lincoln Rhyme.
It begins at a prestigious music school in New York City. A killer flees the scene of a homicide and locks himself in a classroom. Within minutes, the police have him surrounded. When a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot, they break down the door. The room is empty.Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation and to ferret out a master illusionist they've dubbed "the conjurer." As the fatalities rise and the minutes tick down, Rhyme and Sachs must move beyond the smoke and mirrors to prevent a terrifying act of vengeance that could become the greatest vanishing act of all.
The twelfth card
- 544 pages
- 20 hours of reading
Geneva Settle is a bright young high school student from Harlem writing a paper about one of her ancestors, a former slave called Charles Singleton. Geneva is also the target of a ruthless professional killer. Criminalist Lincoln Rhyme and his policewoman partner Amelia Sachs are called into the case, working frantically to anticipate where the hired gun will strike next and how to stop him, all the while trying to get to the truth of Charles Singleton, and the reason that Geneva has been targeted. For Charles Singleton had a secret – a secret that may strike at the very heart of the United States constitution, and have disastrous consequences for human rights today. And Sachs is going to have to search a crime scene that’s 140 years old before she can stop the killer.
It's the night of the full Cold Moon - the month of December according to the lunar calendar. A young man is found dead in lower Manhattan, the first in a series of victims of a man calling himself the Watchmaker. This killer's obsession with time drives him to plan the murders with the precision of fine timepieces, and the victims die prolonged deaths while an eerie clock ticks away their last minutes on earth. Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs and the rest of the crew are tapped to handle the case and stop the Watchmaker and his partner, Vincent Reynolds, a repulsive character with a special interest in the female victims of the killer. Amelia is not only Lincoln's eyes and ears at crime scenes on the Watchmaker case, but she's now running her own homicide investigation-her first case as lead detective. The policewoman's unwavering efforts in pursuing the killers of a businessman, who left behind a wife and son, sets into motion clockwork gears of its own, with consequences reaching to people and events that will endanger not only many lives but Lincoln's and Amelia's future together.
Rhyme's cousin has been arrested for murder. The evidence clearly shows he did it, but Rhyme agrees to check things out. It turns out that the cousin along with other people has been wrongly convicted because the true killer knows every single detail about the lives of the victims he kills and the men he sets up to take the fall for those crimes. This allows him to get close to the victims under false pretenses, murder or rape, and escape safely. And then he sets up others to take the fall for his crimes, planting incontrovertible evidence... Rhyme, Sachs and the rest of the team have to find out who at the huge, ominous data mining company is getting access to this information. Meanwhile the villain--known only by a number to us--realizes he's being pursued and turns his knowledge of data and information into a weapon. Oh, and lest things seem too delicate, he also gets information through good old-fashioned murder and torture too...
The Burning Wire
- 432 pages
- 16 hours of reading
The electrifying ninth Lincoln Rhyme thriller.
The tenth novel in the critically acclaimed Lincoln Rhyme series, from Number One bestselling author Jeffery Deaver. They are calling it the 'million-dollar bullet': a sniper shot from a near-impossible distance. But there is no crime scene investigation, no evidence, and no co-operation from the local Bahamian police. Ambitious New York district attorney Nance Laurel won't let it go. This murder has all the hallmarks of a contract killing, and she has evidence that the order came from the highest levels of the US government. Putting her career on the line, she calls in independent investigators: Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. No strangers to controversy, their reputation for seeing what others miss is unparalleled, and she knows they will risk everything - even their lives - to seek the truth . . .
The Skin Collector
- 438 pages
- 16 hours of reading
COPYCAT? OR REVENGE? They have never seen a murder like it. A talented tattoo artist is using poison instead of ink. His victim is a young woman. And on her skin he's left a message: 'the second'. Drafted in to investigate, NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme and his associate Amelia Sachs find the scene has been scrubbed of evidence. All except for one trace - a scrap of paper that connects this case with one they will never forget. And like the Bone Collector before him, Rhyme and Sachs find themselves pitted against a twisted serial killer choosing his victims seemingly at random, a perpetrator who plans his work to the last detail, in a deadly contest with any who try to stop him. But how close is his connection with that old case? What is the meaning of the words tattooed in poison on the skin of his first victim? And where will he strike next?
The steel kiss
- 629 pages
- 23 hours of reading
Amelia Sachs is hot on the trail of a killer. She’s chasing him through a department store in Brooklyn when an escalator malfunctions. The stairs give way, with one man horribly mangled by the gears. Sachs is forced to let her quarry escape as she jumps in to try to help save the victim. She and famed forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme soon learn, however, that the incident may not be an accident at all, but the first in a series of intentional attacks. They find themselves up against one of their most formidable opponents ever: a brilliant killer who turns common products into murder weapons. As the body count threatens to grow, Sachs and Rhyme must race against the clock to unmask his identity–and discover his mission–before more people die.
Forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme is back with his most harrowing case yet in this newest installment of Jeffrey Deaver's New York Times bestselling series. A businessman snatched from an Upper East Side street in broad daylight. A miniature hangman's noose left at the scene. A nine-year-old girl, the only witness to the crime. With a crime scene this puzzling, forensic expertise of the highest order is absolutely essential. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate. Soon the case takes a stranger turn: a recording surfaces of the victim being slowly hanged, his desperate gasps the backdrop to an eerie piece of music. The video is marked as the work of The Composer... Despite their best efforts, the suspect gets away. So when a similar kidnapping occurs on a dusty road outside Naples, Italy, Rhyme and Sachs don't hesitate to rejoin the hunt. But the search is now a complex case of international cooperation--and not all those involved may be who they seem. Sachs and Rhyme find themselves playing a dangerous game, with lives all across the globe hanging in the balance.
The Cutting Edge
- 448 pages
- 16 hours of reading
Lincoln Rhyme is back - and he and Amelia Sachs must contend with a killer who seems to be targeting couples just as they start out on their lives together. Now a NBC TV series.
