The Twelfth Card
Lincoln Rhyme Book 6
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Goodbye Man, discover Jeffery Deaver's chilling series featuring much-loved protagonists Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs.
How can Lincoln Rhyme catch a killer who leaves no trace?
Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle is running from death. She may only be a bright high school student researching a paper on one of her ancestors, but someone sees her as a threat. Someone who will stop at nothing to prevent her from digging up the past. Someone on a mission to kill.
Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs are called to the case. They may have tracked down some of the world's most brilliant criminals, but this particular hunt is posing more questions than answers. Where will their prey strike next? What is the historic secret he's so desperate to protect? And how can anyone catch a killer who leaves no trace?
To find the answers, Sachs is going to have to search a crime scene that's over 140 years old and attempt to uncover a secret that that may strike at the very heart of the United States constitution . . .
'The pace is terrific, the suspense inexorable, and there is an excellent climax . . . If you want thrills, Deaver is your man' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lincoln Rhyme, Deaver's popular paraplegic detective, returns (after The Vanished Man) in a robust thriller that demonstrates Deaver's unflagging ability to entertain. But even great entertainers have high and lows, and this novel, while steadily absorbing, doesn't match the author's best. Geneva Settle, who's 16 and black, is attacked in a Manhattan library while researching an ancestor, a former slave who harbored a serious secret (not revealed until book's end). Amelia Sachs, Rhyme's lover/assistant, and then Rhyme are pulled into the case, which quickly turns bloody. After Geneva are a lethally cool white hit man and a black ex-con but even when they're identified, their motive remains unclear: why does someone want this feisty, hardworking Harlem schoolgirl dead? To find out, Rhyme primarily relies, as usual, on his and Sachs's strength, forensic analysis; the book's tour de force opening sequence consists mostly of a lengthy depiction of their painstaking dissection of evidence left during the initial attack on Geneva, and every few chapters there's an extensive recap of all evidence collected in the case. Deaver offers more plot twists than seem possible, each fully justified, but this and the emphasis on forensics give the novel more brain than heart. Geneva, a wonderful character, adds feeling to the story, and there are minor personal crises faced by other characters, but as the novel's focus veers from police procedure to odd byways of American history, execution techniques and one more plot twist, the narrative loses grace and form. Even so, this is one of the more lively thrillers of the year and will be a significant bestseller.
