The Coffin Dancer
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Jeffery Deaver |
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| Subtitle | A Lincoln Rhyme Novel |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Honors | |
| Detective Lincoln Rhyme, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is on the hunt for an elusive murderer, the Coffin Dancer. He’s a brilliant hitman who changes his appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims, only one of whom has lived long enough to offer a clue: the assassin has an eerie tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a casket. Like his previous bestselling novels A Maiden’s Grave and The Bone Collector, Jeffery Deaver’s latest psychological thriller combines spine-chilling forensic detail… | |
Detective Lincoln Rhyme, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is on the hunt for an elusive murderer, the Coffin Dancer. He’s a brilliant hitman who changes his appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims, only one of whom has lived long enough to offer a clue: the assassin has an eerie tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a casket.
Like his previous bestselling novels A Maiden’s Grave and The Bone Collector, Jeffery Deaver’s latest psychological thriller combines spine-chilling forensic detail with a turbocharged plot. In The Coffin Dancer, Rhyme, tragically paralyzed from a line-of-duty accident, continues to tutor his beautiful protégé, Detective Amelia Sachs, in the art of criminal hunting. Rhyme is certain he’s seen this killer before, and his suspicion of an earlier encounter fuels a bitter taste for vengeance. When the chameleonlike assassin targets three federal witnesses for death, the stakes reach a new high. Rhyme’s brainpower and Sachs’s legwork are the only tools they have to track the cunning murderer through the subways, parks, and airports of a darkly painted New York City. And they have only forty-eight hours before the Coffin Dancer strikes again.
With The Coffin Dancer, Deaver—already an internationally bestselling author whose acclaimed novels have been translated into a dozen languages—uses his trademark plot twists to keep this fast-paced, masterly thriller steamrolling along with breathtaking speed. This is page-turning suspense of the highest order.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
This return engagement for quadriplegic criminologist Lincoln Rhyme is strong on forensic details as Rhyme tracks an elusive assassin known only by the tattoo that gives this fast-paced thriller its title.
Three witnesses to a murder could put a millionaire arms dealer behind bars for good. When one of them, the co-owner of Hudson Air, is blown up in a plane bombing with the Dancer’s fingerprints all over it, the FBI takes the other witnesses into protective custody. Only Rhyme can decipher a crime scene, read the residue of a bombing, or identify a handful of dirt well enough to keep up with the killer. Helped by Amelia Sachs, his brilliant and able-bodied assistant, Rhyme traces the Dancer through Manhattan streets, airports, and subways. The psychological tension builds rapidly from page one all the way to the stunning and unexpected denouement. At the same time, Jeffery Deaver slowly develops the against-all-odds love affair between Rhyme and Sachs. Fans of Patricia Cornwell and others in the growing subgenre of forensic thrillers will find a lot to enjoy in Deaver’s latest. —Jane Adams
Barnes and Noble
Jeffery Deaver has, over the course of fewer than a dozen novels, made a major reputation for himself in the world of forensic thrillers. His writing is lean and crisp, and his characters seem all too real. The fun of the books is the way Deaver throws them into extraordinary situations. Fans of Jeffery Deaver will be thrilled by the return of Lincoln Rhyme in this new offering. Rhyme is the forensics expert who made a strong showing in Deaver’s fascinating novel The Bone Collector. Unique among his forensics peers, Rhyme is a quadriplegic, but he still manages to be more involved in his cases than his colleagues.
Before we catch up with Rhyme, we’re in the cockpit of a jet with pilot Edward Carney. Carney and his crew are taking a charter flight out of Mamaroneck Regional Airport in New York.The suspense builds all too quickly as Carney, worried about his wife, Percey, tries to reach her via phone before takeoff. When he calls her from the air and hears her voice, he is relieved. But seconds later, the chartered jet he’s piloting gets blown out of the sky. On the ground, Percey gets the news. Fairly quickly, the feds and the cops realize that someone is eliminating witnesses to a crime. Percey may well be the next victim.
Enter Lincoln Rhyme. Rhyme’s entire house is computerized, and when we first meet him, he is examining grains of sand for traces of murder. Rhyme has thoroughly adapted to his life without the use of limbs, and the electronic world that enables him to operate more than functionally is almost an outward metaphor for the inner workings of his mind.Brilliantly,Deaver has created something that few police procedural writers have managed to do: He can show through action the intellectual processes of a detective without ever having his detective lift a finger. Not to suggest that The Coffin Dancer is not an action-oriented story. Rhyme still manages to get around in a somewhat souped-up wheelchair. He has attained a certain strength of spirit since The Bone Collector, too.
What sets this story off and running is Stephen Kall. Kall is a psychologically twisted man, a hired assassin whose job is to kill the two remaining witnesses to criminal activity. It seems that a very bad man is behind bars awaiting a trial that is coming all too soon. With his strong connections, he has hired Kall to off those who would speak out against him.
Kall has a tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper dancing with a woman on a coffin to prove it (hence the novel’s title). In his mind, Kall reenacts his military training even while he aims to kill an innocent woman as she stands at her living room window. A worthy adversary to Rhyme, Kall is a chameleon who manages to blend into any environment, who can charm a lonely woman into providing a cover for him, or become virtually invisible on a street crowded with cops.
Accompanying Rhyme is Amelia Sachs, criminologist and Rhyme’s apprentice of sorts. Sachs and Rhyme share an unusual meeting of minds, a kind of intimacy that is beyond the sexual. They are truly soulmates, and their work together attests to that fact.
From this point, the story zooms into hyperdrive, with Rhyme and Sachs on the trail of serial killer Kall, trying to catch this most elusive of psychos. The plot twists and turns and leads, ultimately, to a shattering and heart-pounding climax that is worthy of such a tense and entertaining story.
