Review by New York Times Review
Still writing against the grain, Ruth Rendell opens her 21st Inspector Wexford mystery, NOT IN THE FLESH (Crown, $25.95), with a rustic English scene featuring a truffle hound named Honey who leads her master to a fragrant growth of fungi buried in Old Grimble's Field. Since this author has neither taste nor time for sentimentality, the mood is abruptly shattered when Honey digs up a skeleton and the picturesque countryman whips out his cellphone to call the police. In the best whodunit tradition, Rendell advances her plot through surprises, some transparent enough to satisfy the engaged reader, others so shocking they dash all calculations. Once a second, fresher body is unearthed on the Grimble property, the original killing no longer seems so obviously tied to a decade-old land dispute. It makes us wonder about all the other people who've gone missing in the vicinity of Kingsmarkham and speculate on why some lives seem to have more value than others. Wexford himself reflects on the fact that women and children are tracked more rigorously than men, who are supposedly more inclined by nature to walk away from their problems. Rendell relies on the same biased thinking to misdirect the police investigation into the lives of the residents whose old houses border Grimble's Field. Calling attention to one local scandal - like the domestic ménage of a famous author and his two wives - is sure to distract from other long-buried village secrets. Even Wexford is preconditioned by his own compassion (for "people - women, mostly - who have been sheltered and protected all their lives and suddenly find themselves alone") to miss signs of criminality. Characters who are old and infirm are especially hard to fathom in a narrative that respects their humanity while refusing to white-wash their flaws. The disagreeable John Grimble might be a cantankerous cuss - or a vicious killer. His disabled neighbor, Irene McNeil, might be a lonely widow - or a nasty old hag. No less than the battered women and the maligned immigrants who play peripheral roles, the village elders can be pathetic, but they can also be evil. Because Rendell views people without prejudice and is surprised by nothing they do, the only character who conforms to type is Honey the truffle dog. Anxious about identity theft? Well, as a Jeffery Deaver character says, "If somebody wants to destroy your life, there's nothing you can do about it." That's the theme of THE BROKEN WINDOW (Simon & Schuster, $26.95), one of the most unnerving of Deaver's eight novels featuring his quadriplegic forensic detective, Lincoln Rhyme. Smarter and scarier than the genre's garden-variety nut jobs, the mad genius at work in this book takes pride in penetrating secure databases. After stripping people of an essential piece, of their lives, he frames them for his own murderous deeds. But here, the rape-torture-killing element seems largely just a concession to the sensationalistic formula of the thriller. Deaver is far more caught up in the devious mechanics of identity fraud, analyzed in depth by Rhyme once it's determined that the killer has access to the supersecret files of a datamining company whose clients include government agencies. While murder is still murder, the image that lingers in this Orwellian nightmare is that of the villain's original guinea pig, once a doctor, now a wretch who calls himself Job and lives in flophouses, hiding from the angry God who stole his life. The wickedly endearing hit man John Keller normally conducts his business in the brisk format of the short story. But Lawrence Block's amiable antihero, who's in Des Moines on a simple point-and-shoot assignment, needs all the extra attention he gets in HIT AND RUN (Morrow, $24.95) after someone sets him up to take the fall for a high-profile political assassination. Having spent most of his ready cash on rare stamps (a hobby offering "a more orderly sphere where serenity ruled and logic prevailed"), Keller barely manages to keep his cool as he makes an extremely tense and hazardous cross-country getaway. By the time he pulls up in New Orleans (an apt destination for someone who fears he's "never going to feel secure again"), the badly rattled button man is ready to retire from the game. Will he or won't he? Block teases out the question thoughtfully, in displays of wry wit and philosophical double-think, and leaves Keller just where we want him: hanging from an existential cliff. In Chapter 1 of THE WATER'S EDGE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), Daniel Judson's carefully built but overwritten novel of guilt and redemption in Southampton, a man looks out a window in the rain and witnesses a double murder. Figuring 13 words to the line, that takes more than 1,500 words. In Chapter 2, a different man awakens in the dark and answers his cellphone. That's another 2,500 words. At this rate, anyone can see where things are headed - to more moody weather reports and bleak interior monologues than any thriller can sustain. The sluggish pace isn't entirely due to Judson's prose style, having as much to do with his construction of two parallel plotlines to deliver the same story from different perspectives. Either protagonist No. 1, Jake Bechet, former boxer and retired mob muscle, or protagonist No. 2, Tommy Miller, former P.I. and son of a crooked cop, could carry this violent gangster narrative on his own. But when the action takes place during a soggy spring in a coastal resort on Long Island, that's double the work and double the talk - and a lot of weather reporting. In Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford mystery, a dog finds a skeleton in the English countryside.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
As the Lincoln Rhyme series rolls along, the quadriplegic criminalist's cases keep getting more and more elaborate. The Cold Moon (2006) was extremely intricate, but this one tops it. Lincoln's cousin has been arrested for murder. The case seems airtight, but when he looks into it, Rhyme begins to suspect that he has stumbled onto an especially devious serial killer, one who uses cutting-edge data-mining techniques to steal the identities of his victims and of the innocent people he frames for his crimes. Rhyme is perhaps the best and smartest investigator in the game, but how do you catch a killer when you don't know anything about him? If a large part of writing a mystery is like making a puzzle, then Deaver may just be the cleverest puzzle maker in the business. He has built his reputation on the strength of well-drawn characters; hyperrealistic dialogue (you don't read it, you hear it); and right-angle plot twists that are impossible to predict. There is no one quite like Deaver or like Lincoln Rhyme.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Deaver's entertaining eighth Lincoln Rhyme novel (after The Cold Moon), Rhyme, a forensic consultant for the NYPD, and his detective partner, Amelia Sachs, take on a psychotic mastermind who uses data mining--"the business of the twenty-first century"--not only to select and hunt down his victims but also to frame the crimes on complete innocents. Rhyme is reluctantly drawn into a case involving his estranged cousin, Arthur, who's been charged with first-degree murder. But when Rhyme and his crew look into the strange set of circumstances surrounding his cousin's alleged crime, they discover tangential connections to a company that specializes in collecting and analyzing consumer data. Further investigation leads them to some startlingly Orwellian revelations: Big Brother is watching your every move and could be a homicidal maniac. The topical subject matter makes the story line particularly compelling, while longtime fans will relish Deaver's intimate exploration of a tragedy from Rhyme's adolescence. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Deaver duo Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are stalking a killer who excels at framing others. With a 12-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
It's a must-solve case for quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme when his cousin is arrested for murder. The evidence seems incontrovertible. Arthur Rhyme came over to Alice Sanderson's apartment--leaving generous amounts of trace evidence from his home and DNA traces from his person--then attacked and killed her; stole a prized painting she'd just purchased; and left, obligingly depositing trace evidence from the crime scene back home. But since Rhyme can't believe that his cousin killed anyone, he's forced to conclude that there's been an elaborate frame-up by someone who may well have done the same thing before. Fans of the serial-killer specialist (The Cold Moon, 2006, etc.) won't be surprised when Rhyme, his partner Amelia Sachs and the rest of the NYPD crew he's hastily cobbled together turn up two well-nigh identical crimes that exonerate Arthur to their satisfaction, even though he continues to languish in a lockup that seems to get more dangerous by the hour. A rare slip by the elusive killer leaves Rhyme with a bag of material he'd been on his way to plant at the home of still another innocent suspect. The big catch here is a Post-It note that sends Rhyme and company to Strategic Systems Datacorp, which collects and resells data, mountains of data, on every American it can. Deciding that the perp knows so much about the patsies he sets up, from their shoe sizes to their favorite brands of underwear, that he must have some connection to SSD, Rhyme commences collecting data on the data collectors. The ensuing investigation, which bogs down amid factitious thrills and the faceless geeks at SSD, feels like the work of a ghostwriter who knows the formula and uses the right names but lacks Deaver's customary brio and fiendish ingenuity. On the plus side, the master criminal, instantly forgettable on his own terms, will tap into many paranoid readers' twin bogeymen: identity theft and government surveillance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
