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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Aint Half a Good Book, 22 Jun 2006
Deaver finally gets back on form bringing his signature to this great and clever thriller, not quite Coffin Dancer the best thriller ever written and the only book that made me miss my underground stop. The twists are beautiful the villains almost too many to keep track of but very good anyway. The villain this time is a suspect called the Watchmaker who is obsessed with clocks and killing people very very slowly to make them suffer for a reason that becomes clear later on in the book. Just when you think you have solved it you can be sure you have not and that there is yet another twist/book around the corner to proove you have not. This is 1000 times better than the previous attempts recently and I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Let's twist again, 23 Aug 2006
I believe this is the seventh of the Rhyme-Sachs escapades but I regret to say, as a dedicated fan and owner of fourteen Jeffery Deaver novels, that this particular franchise is in danger of running out of steam. From a technical point of view it is awesome, a masterpiece with highly impressive accounts of police tactics and forensic research, with the psychological science of kinesics now added to the mix. But if there is such a thing as showboating in crime fiction writing then Deaver may be guilty of it, because this tale has more twists than a fistful of fusilli and I for one am growing slightly tired of it. In a way, the first of the many twists was most welcome, because the first story (there's more than one, in effect) was so by-the-numbers Deaver fare that I was almost crying out for the `shock surprise' that would change the direction of the tale completely. The thing is, there's fiction and there's fantasy - not only are the plans of the bad guy - the Watchmaker - rather less than credible in their complexity, but the foresight of Lincoln Rhyme in being able to thwart him is even more so. It's as if the baddie's too bad to be true, and the good guy's too good - or at least has incredible detective skills that border on mind-reading.
If anything, our immobile hero Linc takes something of a back seat (or wheelchair) to his established partner Amelia Sachs and a newcomer to the series in the form of a female kinesics expert (Kathryn Dance - note the musical innuendo again) who just happens to get deeply involved in this case while visiting New York from her native California. Come to think about it, Dance is `on her way to the airport' for the entirety of this novel, but keeps on putting it off to another day. Anyway, Sachs enjoys a new responsibility as lead detective in a suicide case that might just be murder in disguise (guess which!), and this distracts her from helping Rhyme out in his pursuit of the evil Watchmaker. This is a man who seems to have the time for ten seemingly unrelated murders and leaves a clock beside each victim as a calling card. I was relieved when this `plan' altered dramatically and we suddenly found ourselves heading in an utterly different direction, moving away from an almost boring serial-killing spree and onto the slightly more interesting subject of police corruption. That didn't last long though, oh no. Time to get nasty again, and conjure up a completely new objective for the bad guy that has nothing to do with watchmaking or bent coppers. Despite this confusion, Lincoln Rhyme miraculously sees through it all from the comfort of his high-tech town house in Central Park West and basically saves the world. Well, lots of potential victims, at any rate.
Anyone new to the Deaver style may well enjoy all these twists, but for those of us who have seen it all before - and in my case, enjoyed it a lot, to be fair - it was just a little too much. In combining presumably very accurate accounts of forensic science in the pursuit of justice with criminals and criminalists who are just too bad or too good to be true, we are left with a somewhat lop-sided mixture of authentic police procedural work and leading characters who are less than convincing in their identities, objectives and capabilities. In the real world, crime is a lot muckier and so is the solving of it.
Picture Chubby Checker being whipped away by a tornado and you have a ridiculous image of mind-boggling twisting. Or you could read Cold Moon - your impression would be much the same.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jeffery's Best Lincoln Rhyme for a while!, 24 July 2006
Thank God: Jeffery Deaver hasn't totally lost it after all!
After three bad Lincoln Rhyme novels (the disappointing 'The Stone Monkey, the frankly rubbish 'The Vanished Man' and the tedious 'The Twelfth Card') he once again hits some kind of form here. If he hadn't penned the excellent 'The Garden of Beasts' two years ago I'd have written him off by now, but no, he's proved with this latest volume that all the old ingenuity is still there.
Of course the plot is often preposterous (is 'The Bone Collector' really credible anyone?) but it's done with such verve and vigour that you can't help but get carried along in the excitement. And you simply won't believe how many twists there are in this one!
So, well done Jeffery, keep up this standard and you'll be up there in my top three favourite American crime writers again.
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