The Bone Collector

[sawyl]

While with my folks, they mentioned that one of their guests had persuaded them to read Jeffery Deaver's The Bone Collector. Not wanting to lag behind the curve, I read it this afternoon.

Lincoln Rhyme was New York's best forensic scientist until an accident left him quadriplegic and suicidal. But when a former colleague arrives with a juicy case, Rhyme reluctantly allows himself to become involved. Recognising that the only person who attempted to protect the evidence of the crime scene was patrol cop Amelia Sachs, Rhyme recruits Sachs to be his eyes and ears on the case.

Following clues left at the scene of the first two murders, Rhyme and Sachs race to decode the evidence to locate the murderer's next victims before it is too late. Despite some close calls, the police manage to save most of the other victims, but struggle when a fire in a church causes the next set of clues to be lost. Eventually, the murderer starts to become frustrated when his actions are thwarted one to many times and turns his attention to the police.

Despite the absurd conclusion, Deaver does a nice job of capturing the mind of psychology both of the increasingly unhinged murderer and of Rhymes, who has lost all enthusiasm for life following his accident. There are a few errors in the science — obvious enough that I was able to pick them up without recourse to wikipedia — but otherwise the details seem pretty well done.