The most mannered of all Rhyme’s adventures, with more red herrings than a fish market and a climax that’s both a bang and a...
The latest serial killer to duke it out with quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme is a nefarious figure, the Watchmaker, whose bark, sadly, is a lot worse than his bite.
The first two victims are linked by identical clocks left at the crime scenes and the killer’s clear determination to prolong each death for as long as possible. But Lincoln Rhyme and his legman/investigator Amelia Sachs don’t need to work very hard to find clues to a killer who signs his work with a snatch of dark doggerel. Evidently the perps, soon identified for readers as unflappable Gerald Duncan and his rapist sidekick Vincent Reynolds, are intent on leaving a trail of evidence that will lead directly to them. Will Rhyme, Sachs and the NYPD catch the pair before they can kill florist Joanne Harper, Sgt. Lucy Richter and the rest of the victims they seem to have lined up? Fans of Rhyme’s first six cases (The Twelfth Card, 2005, etc.) will skip this question to focus on a more interesting one: Which of the leads, revelations, twists and confessions can be trusted, and which have been planted for purposes best known to the Watchmaker? Deaver, an old pro at pulling rugs out from under readers, adds a piquant complication this time: another case Sachs is working on her own (an impossible suicide she’s sure is murder) whose connection to the Watchmaker is worth the price of admission. But this time the complications—a technical term that refers to the extra dials and functions built into a first-rate chronometer—go way over the top for the last 100 pages, and the case peters out in diminishing returns.
The most mannered of all Rhyme’s adventures, with more red herrings than a fish market and a climax that’s both a bang and a whimper.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6093-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.
Helped by a beautiful grifter, the “Camel Club”—the four-man band of conspiracy theorists—returns to battle a threat to national security.
Annabelle Conroy is con-artist extraordinaire; Jerry Bagger, mobster and mark; and Roger Seagraves, master assassin. All come straight from central casting. Seagraves is killing high-level government officials, and Conroy is putting together the con of the century, with Bagger as the target. The mysterious death of a rare-books expert at the Library of Congress launches the story, which splits off at first into two different plotlines. In one, Conroy and her team work their way up to their major score. In the other, the Camel Club investigates the mysterious death of a close friend. Things are slightly more exciting in Conroy’s world. She’s assembling her team, eager to settle an old score by taking down Atlantic City’s most notorious and ruthless casino owner. After a series of capers out west to build their bankroll, the team heads back east. There’s little drama Players act out their part; marks fall. The big score comes off without a hitch. The two plots intersect halfway through. Annabelle arrives in D.C., thanks to an awkward development, along with a new piece of unfinished business. Seagraves and the Camel Club are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, and Annabelle Conroy is the special guest star. The merged stories reach a predictable conclusion. An obvious conflict remains unresolved for much of the way, setting up the next chapter in the saga.
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-53109-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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