Z/Web

Author: Jeffery Deaver

This is another Lincoln Rhyme detective novel, with Rhyme up against perhaps his most formidable foe yet. This time he’s going against an information guru, a guy who knows everything. He’s an identity thief who uses computerized info about people to commit crimes and set up the perfect fall guys who are convicted of the crimes so he’s never caught. Since he knows everything about people, his frame-ups are amazingly air-tight, but in this book he makes the mistake of setting up Lincoln’s cousin, which brings Lincoln into the investigation and of course that sets up his downfall. The book is quite thick and long, as Deaver’s books usually are — this one moves pretty well but feels too long and it should have been about 75% of its length. For the most part I enjoyed the action, and the computer/tech stuff was, except for a few odd errors, pretty accurate and interesting. A large part of the novel centers around the debate over consumer privacy, and the book raises a lot of good concerns (not the least of which is the killer’s ability to know everything). Unfortunately I was not as big of a fan of the ending of the book, which has too much of Deaver’s typical manipulation (just tell us the story and stop trying to be clever and screw with our minds), and the climax is pretty much a big fight which is anticlimactic. I would have preferred a more tech-oriented ending, something more worthy of the intelligence of the opponent than a mere fight. But all that said, this is an above average Lincoln Rhyme novel, and worth the read if you’re a fan.