The hero of Jeffery Deaver's thriller The Bone Collector is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic scientist known to his peers as "the world's foremost criminalist." Rhyme will need all his reason--and his considerable stock of high-tech tools--about him to solve this latest brain-twister: a serial killer with method to his madness. In tried and true thriller fashion, the killer's crimes are described in lurid detail, as is the astounding technological equipment with which Rhyme examines the evidence--everything from an energy-dispersive x-ray unit to a mass spectrometer. Every fictional detective has his or her gimmick, from Sherlock Holmes's violin to Nero Wolf's orchids, and Rhyme is no exception. He is a quadriplegic who can move nothing but a single finger. Gadget-philes will be in seventh heaven reading about Lincoln Rhyme's tools; other readers might feel the book could do with a few more plausible characters and a little less technology.

From Publishers Weekly
Deaver (A Maiden's Grave) is too fond of gimmicks. They range in this novel from the extreme (his detective here, Lincoln Rhyme, is a quadriplegic who can move only one finger) to the moderately eccentric (beautiful policewoman Amelia Sachs, who acts as Rhyme's arms and legs, suffers from arthritis). And his villain, a serial killer who models his crimes on ones he finds in a book on criminal life in old New York, has an uncomfortable way of slaying each of his victims in ways guaranteed to stop the heart or turn the stomach: buried alive, flayed by high-pressure steam, eaten by hungry rats, burned alive, attacked by mad dogs. All this takes place in the course of one busy New York weekend as the killer helpfully leaves playful little clues as to where he's going to strike next and Rhyme uses his immense savvy (and a battery of computerized testing tools) to figure it out. The whole affair, in fact, is incredibly silly, though the headlong narrative, with Sachs arriving in the nick of time (driving at 80 mph through New York streets) to perform rescues that seem to belong in a comic strip rather than a novel, never lets up, and there is plenty of genuine forensic knowledge in evidence. There are dramatic switcheroos up to the very last page, and a climactic battle to the death that might make even teenage boys wince. For it seems to be at that kind of readership?uncritical and doting on violence?that the novel is aimed. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; film rights sold to Martin Bregman and Universal Pictures; simultaneous Penguin audio. (Mar.) FYI: An HBO movie of A Maiden's Grave, starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, will air in January 1997.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The author of The Maiden's Grave (LJ 9/1/95) launches a new series featuring an unusual protagonist?a paralyzed criminologist who teams up with rookie cop Amelia Sachs to unearth a particularly vicious killer called "the Bone Collector."Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio
The technology in Jeffery Deaver's new thriller, The Bone Collector, is so dazzling it makes your eyes water. . . . The problem here is that when their tools are in the toy chest, Mr. Deaver doesn't know what to do with his characters except inflate them into caricatures.

From AudioFile
Be warned! In this novel Jeffery Deaver provides, not only heart-pounding suspense and fascinating details about police forensics, but also gruesome minutiae of sadistic mayhem. David McCallum does his best to render the latter with as much taste as the context allows while doing every justice to the author's other attributes. Some may boggle at the hard-boiled NYPD being filtered through a British accent. But McCallum displays a thorough knowledge of the urban American idiom and may be forgiven his refinement. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
With an initial print run of 100,000 copies and the film rights sold to Universal, it's obvious that somebody has high expectations for this book. Whatever success it achieves, however, will not be based on its literary merits. Cardboard characters are propelled by clunky prose through a silly plot. A quadriplegic detective comes out of retirement to try to catch a brilliant serial killer (a word to the wise: if you know anyone who's brilliant, watch your back!) who's re-creating murders from the turn of the century. Deaver did his homework, and he doesn't let a drop of research go to waste--arcane technical and historical factoids are dumped all over the pages. Oh, well. There's going to be a lot of publicity behind The Bone Collector, including a tie-in with an HBO movie based on another Deaver novel, A Maiden's Grave (1995), due to air in January, so it will no doubt move. June Vigor

From Kirkus Reviews
A quadriplegic criminalist hunts the most elusive quarry of his career: a serial killer who leaves clues at each crime scene allowing the cops to head off the next murder--if they can decode them in time. With nothing left to live for since an accident ended his forensic career and his marriage, bearish Lincoln Rhyme has made an appointment with Dr. William Berger, of the suicide-friendly Lethe Society. But Rhyme's old NYPD colleague, Det. Lon Sellitto, just happens to breeze in, uninvited and unwelcome, minutes before Berger does, and talks Rhyme out of suicide and into spearheading the hunt for Unsub 823, the demonic cabbie whose fares often face nightmarish scenarios of torture and death. Though he shows no mercy to his victims, Unsub 823 obligingly salts each crime scene with cryptic clues to his next, clues that whet Rhyme's jaundiced appetite and give him the hope of saving currency trader T.J. Colfax, German emigr‚e Monelle Gerger, elderly William Everett, and widowed Carole Ganz and her daughter. It's not long before Rhyme's blood is pumping again, and he's persuaded beautiful Amelia Sachs, the Major Crimes officer who preserved the first crime scene long enough to gather a few precious scraps of evidence, to put off her medical transfer to Public Affairs and become his eyes, ears, and nose at each gory scene. Working feverishly against a series of impossible deadlines, Sachs and Rhyme piece together a profile of the perp's appearance, his lodgings, his car, his habits, and the id‚e fixe that drives him: He believes he's the Bone Collector, a demented ghoul who preyed on New York's dead and near-dead at the turn of the century, determined to free his victims from this mortal coil by stripping them to ageless bone. Deaver (A Maiden's Grave, 1995, etc.) marries forensic work that would do Patricia Cornwell proud to a turbocharged plot that puts Benzedrine to shame. (First printing of 100,000; film rights to Universal; $100,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Midwest Book Review
A terrible murderer who tortures his victims to death challenges the local authorities to solve crimes via minute clues left at the scene in Deaver's tense thriller. Unlike similar crime books, this focus only lightly on the torture scenes and creates tension through satisfying Sherlock Holmes-type detecting and the spunky personalities of the investigators. A fine thriller.

Wall Street Journal
A breakneck thrill-ride.

Book Description
Look who's back to chill readers to the bone...

The first novel featuring Detective Lincoln Rhyme, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stone Monkey.

Download Description
"In his most gripping thriller yet, Jeffery Deaver takes readers on a terrifying ride into two ingenious minds...that of a physically challenged detective and the scheming killer he must stop. The detective was the former head of forensics at the NYPD, but is now a quadriplegic who can only exercise his mind. The killer is a man whose obsession with old New York helps him choose his next victim. Now, with the help of a beautiful young cop, this diabolical killer must be stopped before he can kill again! "

FROM OUR EDITORS

Jeffery Deaver's 1997 thriller The Bone Collector gets a new lease on life, courtesy of a high-profile film adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. I haven't seen the movie, but I can vouch for the effectiveness of the novel. The Bone Collector isn't, by any stretch, world-class literature, but it's an absorbing, high-energy performance that features great technical expertise, some truly devious plotting, and one of the most unusual heroes in modern crime fiction: Lincoln Rhyme, forensic genius and former head of the NYPD's Central Investigation and Resource Department.

Lincoln Rhyme is a legend in his field, the man who literally wrote the book on forensic analysis of crime scenes. He is also a quadriplegic, his spine having been irreversibly damaged during a cave-in at an underground murder site. As the novel opens, Lincoln has reached the end of his emotional tether and wants only to die. Unable to endure the constraints and humiliations of his new condition, he has enlisted the services of a professional "euthanasist" to help him on his way. At the eleventh hour, with oblivion within his grasp, Lincoln is visited by a pair of detectives who offer him something he can't quite refuse: a new -- and unusual -- case.

On the previous evening, a man and woman returning from a business trip had been kidnapped at JFK airport, apparently by their taxi driver. The man's body -- shot, mutilated, then buried alive -- has just been found by an NYPD patrol officer named Amelia Sachs, who closes off the crime scene and secures the available evidence. Included among that evidence are some enigmatic clues -- a scrap of newsprint, a ball of asbestos, a rusted iron bolt -- that appear to have been placed deliberately at the scene. With the expert assistance of a reluctant Lincoln Rhyme, police follow these clues to the location of the abducted woman. They arrive just minutes too late to save the woman, who has been murdered in a particularly brutal fashion. Near her body is a second series of "staged" forensic clues, pointing to the location of the next unknown victim.

Against his will, Lincoln finds himself at the center of a manhunt that interrupts his planned departure and transforms his apartment into an impromptu forensic lab. Using patrolwoman Amelia Sachs as his eyes and legs, Lincoln engages in a sustained battle of wits with an unknown killer who leads him to a series of crime scenes, each of which is salted with evidence pointing to the next crime scene and the next victim. During the course of this macabre, extended game -- which lasts for about 36 hours and is played out against a backdrop of political infighting and jurisdictional disputes -- Lincoln saves a number of lives, including his own. In the end, he comes face-to-face with an elusive -- and very familiar -- madman whose pathological obsession has its origin in Lincoln's own past.

Although the plot of The Bone Collector occasionally strains credibility, it is still a compelling, cleverly-conceived narrative that achieves moments of great tension and creates something new and vital out of the marriage of two popular subgenres: the serial killer novel, as practiced by Thomas Harris and his numerous imitators; and the forensic crime novel, as practiced by Patricia Cornwell, Ridley Pearson, and Kathy Reichs, to name just a few. Ultimately, it is the range and depth of Deaver's forensic expertise that gives The Bone Collector its peculiar, undeniable fascination.

In crime scene after crime scene, Lincoln -- operating through his observant, mobile assistant, Amelia -- uncovers two distinct types of physical evidence: staged evidence deliberately left behind and other, unintended bits of evidence that lead, in incremental stages, to the killer's home base. Watching Lincoln and his cohorts interpret this evidence -- sometimes intuitively, sometimes with the aid of assorted technological marvels -- is the greatest of The Bone Collector's many pleasures. Like Michael Crichton, Deaver manages to integrate a vast amount of research into a coherent, involving novel without either lecturing the reader or crossing the invisible line into pedantry. It's a difficult trick to perform, and Deaver brings it off with impressive -- and deceptive -- ease.

It will be interesting, of course, to see what Hollywood makes of all this. But even if the movie is an unqualified disaster, readers will still have the Deaver original to return to. Lincoln Rhyme, for all his problems, is an engaging, complex character and may prove to be surprisingly durable. He has already made two return appearances (as the central figure of The Coffin Dancer and as a minor player in The Devil's Teardrop), and I hope Deaver sees fit to revisit him, at least occasionally. Unlike the majority of series heroes, he brings a depth of knowledge and a freshness of perspective to the traditional novel of detection. I look forward to encountering him again.

—Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lincoln Rhyme, ex-head of NYPD forensics, was the nation's foremost criminalist, the man who could work a crime scene and come away with a perfect profile of the killer, frozen in time. Now, Lincoln is frozen in place - permanently. An accident on the job left him a quadriplegic who can move just one finger, a great mind strapped to his bed, mulish and sarcastic, hiding from a life he no longer wants to live. Until he sees the crime-scene report about a corpse found buried on a deserted West Side railroad track, its bloody hand rising from the dirt. It belonged to a man who got into a cab at the airport and never got out. Reluctantly, Lincoln Rhyme abandons retirement to track down a killer whose ingenious clues hold the secret to saving his victims - if Rhyme can decipher them in time. The search leads him to the Bone Collector, whose obsession with old New York colors every scrap of evidence he leaves for Rhyme and his new partner, Amelia Sachs, whom he drafts as his arms and legs. But she's never worked a crime scene in her life - and he can only whisper in her ear as she does the exacting work he loved more than anything else.

FROM THE CRITICS

Peter Straub

Exciting and fast-paced.

Wall Street Journal

A breakneck thrill-ride.

Publishers Weekly

Deaver (A Maiden's Grave) is too fond of gimmicks. They range in this novel from the extreme (his detective here, Lincoln Rhyme, is a quadriplegic who can move only one finger) to the moderately eccentric (beautiful policewoman Amelia Sachs, who acts as Rhyme's arms and legs, suffers from arthritis). And his villain, a serial killer who models his crimes on ones he finds in a book on criminal life in old New York, has an uncomfortable way of slaying each of his victims in ways guaranteed to stop the heart or turn the stomach: buried alive, flayed by high-pressure steam, eaten by hungry rats, burned alive, attacked by mad dogs. All this takes place in the course of one busy New York weekend as the killer helpfully leaves playful little clues as to where he's going to strike next and Rhyme uses his immense savvy (and a battery of computerized testing tools) to figure it out. The whole affair, in fact, is incredibly silly, though the headlong narrative, with Sachs arriving in the nick of time (driving at 80 mph through New York streets) to perform rescues that seem to belong in a comic strip rather than a novel, never lets up, and there is plenty of genuine forensic knowledge in evidence. There are dramatic switcheroos up to the very last page, and a climactic battle to the death that might make even teenage boys wince. For it seems to be at that kind of readership-uncritical and doting on violence-that the novel is aimed. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; film rights sold to Martin Bregman and Universal Pictures; simultaneous Penguin audio. (Mar.) FYI: An HBO movie of A Maiden's Grave, starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, will air in January 1997.

Library Journal

The author of The Maiden's Grave (LJ 9/1/95) launches a new series featuring an unusual protagonista paralyzed criminologist who teams up with rookie cop Amelia Sachs to unearth a particularly vicious killer called "the Bone Collector."

AudioFile