Deaver, Jeffery

The Sleeping Doll: A Novel (Kathryn Dance Novels)

When Special Agent Kathryn Dance -- a brilliant interrogator and kinesics expert with the California Bureau of Investigation -- is sent to question the convicted killer Daniel "Son of Manson" Pell as a suspect in a newly unearthed crime, she feels both trepidation and electrifying intrigue. Pell is serving a life sentence for the brutal murders of the wealthy Croyton family in Carmel years earlier -- a crime mirroring those perpetrated by Charles Manson in the 1960s. But Pell and his cult members were sloppy: Not only were they apprehended, they even left behind a survivor -- the youngest of the Croyton daughters, who, because she was in bed hidden by her toys that terrible night, was dubbed the Sleeping Doll.

But the girl never spoke about that night, nor did the crime's mastermind. Indeed, Pell has long been both reticent and unrepentant about the crime. And so with the murderer transported from the Capitola superprison to an interrogation room in the Monterey County Courthouse, Dance sees an opportunity to pry a confession from him for the recent murder -- and to learn more about the depraved mind of this career criminal who considers himself a master of control, a dark Svengali, forcing people to do what they otherwise would never conceive of doing. In an electrifying psychological jousting match, Dance calls up all her skills as an interrogator and kinesics -- body language -- expert to get to the truth behind Daniel Pell.

But when Dance's plan goes terribly wrong and Pell escapes, leaving behind a trail of dead and injured, she finds herself in charge of her first-ever manhunt. But far from simply fleeing, Pell turns on his pursuers -- and other innocents -- for reasons Dance and her colleagues can't discern. As the idyllic Monterey Peninsula is paralyzed by the elusive killer, Dance turns to the past to find the truth about what Daniel Pell is really up to. She tracks down the now teenage Sleeping Doll to learn what really happened that night, and she arranges a reunion of three women who were in his cult at the time of the killings. The lies of the past and the evasions of the present boil up under the relentless probing of Kathryn Dance, but will the truth about Daniel Pell emerge in time to stop him from killing again?

A Dish Served Cold

I love nothing better than surprising the readers of my short stories with a big twist in the end. They think the story is going in one direction and, bang, it ends up some place else. This is true of A Dish Served Cold, a crime short story set in Arizona. If any readers can guess the ending, I'd love to hear from them (through my website)!

The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme Novels)

It's not easy being NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme, the world's foremost criminalist. First of all, he's a quadriplegic. Secondly, he's forever being second-guessed and mother-henned by his ex-model-turned-cop protégé, Amelia Sachs, and his personal aide, Thom. And thirdly, it seems that he can't motor his wheelchair around a corner without bumping into one crazed psycho-killer after another.

In The Empty Chair, Jeffery Deaver's third Rhyme outing--after 1997's The Bone Collector and 1998's The Coffin Dancer--Rhyme travels to North Carolina to undergo an experimental surgical procedure and is, a jot too coincidentally, met at the door by a local sheriff, the cousin of an NYPD colleague, bearing one murder, two kidnappings, and a timely plea for help. It seems that 16-year-old Garrett Hanlon, a bug-obsessed orphan known locally as the Insect Boy, has kidnapped and probably raped two women, and bludgeoned to death a would-be hero who tried to stop one of the abductions.

Rhyme sets up shop, Amelia leads the local constabulary (easily recognized by their out-of-joint noses) into the field, and, after some Holmesian brain work and a good deal of exciting cat-and-mousing, the duo leads the cops to their prey. And just as you're idly wondering why the case is coming to an end in the middle of the book, Amelia breaks the boy out of jail and goes on the lam. Equally convinced of the boy's guilt and the danger he poses to Amelia, Rhyme has no choice but to aid the police in apprehending the woman he loves--no easy task, as she's the one human being who truly knows the methods of Lincoln Rhyme.

Rhyme's specialty combines the minute scientific analysis of physical evidence gathered from crime scenes and his arcane knowledge of, it would seem, every organic and inorganic substance on earth. Deaver combines engaging narration, believable characters, and his trademark ability to repeatedly pull the rug out from under the reader's feet. Lincoln Rhyme's back all right, and the smart money's betting that his run has just begun. --Michael Hudson

Renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme faces his ultimate opponent: a kidnapper and murderer dubbed the Insect Boy. But Rhyme is in for a surprise when he learns that catching a criminal is one thing...and keeping him is another. Now Rhyme, in North Carolina to undergo risky spinal cord surgery, finds himself hunting a ruthless killer in the heart of a southern swampland -- and going head-to-head with his protégé, Amelia Sachs, in a rivalry that tests the limits of both their expertise and their love.

Jeffery Deaver's ingenious, wheelchair-bound criminalist from the international bestsellers The Bone Collector and The Coffin Dancer returns with a bang when an appointment at a renowned North Carolina hospital puts him in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. When the police turn to Lincoln for help finding two kidnapped hometown girls, he has no idea that the kidnapper will ultimately come between him and everything he holds dear -- especially his esteemed protegee and love, Amelia Sachs. When Rhyme and Sachs disagree about the perpetrator's identity, they find themselves pitted against one another in a winner-take-all battle of wits. A battle that will test the meaning -- and price -- of loyalty. The Empty Chair features the signature plot twists and heart-stopping suspense that have made Deaver a household name.

The Lesson of Her Death

The Coffin Dancer (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)

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

NYPD criminalist Lincoln Rhyme joins his beautiful protégé, Amelia Sachs, in the hunt for the Coffin Dancer -- an ingenious killer who changes appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims. They have only one clue: the madman has a tattoo of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman. Rhyme must rely on his wits and intuition to track the elusive murderer through New York City -- knowing they have only forty-eight hours before the Coffin Dancer strikes again.

Detective Lincoln Rhymes, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is put on the trail of the Coffin Dancer, a cunning professional killer who has continually alluded the police. Rhymes - -a quadriplegic since a line-of-duty accident -- must use his wits to track this brilliant killer who's been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. Rhyme works with his eyes and ears, New York cop Amelia Sachs, to gather information from trace evidence at the crime scene (for a start, scrapings from the tires of the emergency vehicles that responded to the Chicago crash) to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off. In the resulting game of cat-and- mouse, both Rhyme and the Dancer are constantly subject to unbelievably timely hunches and brain waves that keep their deadly shuttlecock in play down to the wire. Fair warning to newcomers: Author Deaver is just as cunning and deceptive as his killer; don't assume he's run out of tricks until you've run out of pages. By the author of "The Bone Collector."

The Bone Collector (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)

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.

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.

"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! "

Hell's Kitchen

Perennial bestselling author Jeffrey Deaver's alter ego, William Jefferies, knows a thing or two about Hollywood. So does John Pellam, the hero of his previous Shallow Graves and Bloody River Blues and the latest in the series, Hell's Kitchen. Pellam made a name for himself as a director before a stint in San Quentin took him off the fast track. Since his release he's been earning his keep as a location scout and not so incidentally shooting a documentary about New York's Hell's Kitchen, which he hopes will propel him back into the career that skidded south after he ran afoul of the law.

Pellam has found the star of his new film, one Ettie Washington, who has lived in the neighborhood for decades and is the perfect voice to tell the story of an area that's losing its old-time seediness to urban gentrification. But then Ettie's tenement goes up in a blaze that kills a small boy and puts her right in the public eye--as a suspect. It's only the beginning of a series of fires, each one more deadly. The cops know Ettie couldn't have set the others, since she's been in jail, but they're convinced she knows who did. Pellam has his own reasons for getting Ettie off the hook and embarking on a search for the real pyromaniac. Jeffries saves the best one for the very end of this taut, well-paced, and highly atmospheric thriller. --Jane Adams

The New York Times bestselling author of The Empty Chair and The Devil's Teardrop, is back displaying his "ticking-bomb suspense" (People) in this never-before-published thriller.

Every New York City neighborhood has a story, but what John Pellam uncovers in Hell's Kitchen has a darkness all its own. The Hollywood location scout and former stuntman is in the Big Apple hoping to capture the unvarnished memories of longtime Kitchen residents such as Ettie Washington in a no-budget documentary film. But when a suspicious fire ravages the elderly woman's crumbling tenement, Pellam realizes that someone might want the past to stay buried.

As more buildings and lives go up in flames, Pellam takes to the streets, seeking the twisted pyromaniac who sells services to the highest bidder. But Pellam is unaware that the fires are merely flickering preludes to the arsonist's ultimate masterpiece, a conflagration of nearly unimaginable proportion, with Hell's Kitchen -- and John Pellam -- at its blackened and searing epicenter.

Readers everywhere thrill to Jeffery Deaver's New York Times bestselling novels -- and now, Pocket Books presents his third and final book in the classic Location Scout mystery series! Hollywood location scout and former stuntman John Pellam is at hard at work on a new, no-budget documentary highlighting the fascinating history of New York's Hell's Kitchen. But when suspicious fires begin ravaging tenement buildings and claiming lives, Pellam realizes he's trapped in the deadly schemes of a twisted pyromaniac -- and unaware that the worst is yet to come....

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Twenty-one-year-old Rune is an aspiring filmmaker, but so far her only break has been scoring a job as an underpaid production assistant in Manhattan. Still, she's always on the lookout for the perfect topic for her own film--and she thinks she's found it when she witnesses the bombing of a triple-X movie theater in Times Square. Rune's got a great hook for her documentary: She plans to film it through the eyes of Shelly Lowe, the porn star whose movie was playing at the theater when it exploded.  But just hours after Rune films a poignant Shelly reflecting on her dreams of becoming a serious actress, a second bomb silences the beautiful film star forever. Was Shelly in the wrong place at the wrong time--or was she the bomber's target all along? Rune vows to find out the truth behind the death of this blue movie star. But as she struggles to finish shooting her film, Rune's labor of love may be her final masterpiece--as a shooting of a more lethal kind threatens to write an ending to this story that no one wants to see....

Hard News

Rune is an aspiring filmmaker with more ambition than political savvy, paying her dues as an assistant cameraperson for the local news. But she's got her eyes on the prize, the network's hot newsmagazine, Current Events -- and she's got the story she knows will get her there.

Poking around in the video archives, Rune spots a taped interview with Randy Boggs, who's doing hard time in Attica for a murder he claims he didn't commit. Rune can't say exactly why, but she's sure he's innocent. If she can prove it, Current Events won't merely report the news, it'll make news -- and Rune's career.

But what she could be writing is Randy Boggs's epitaph -- and her own. Rune's newly discovered witness soon turns up dead. A hit man from Miami is on Rune's trail, and Boggs is finding prison even more dangerous than before. Someone wants this story killed, and it could be the girl with the camera who ends up on the cutting room floor.

Praying for Sleep

Praying for revenge...Psycho killer Michael Hrubek has escaped to find the woman who put him away. He'll show her what killing is all about...Praying for salvation...Lis knows he's out there. He's haunted every sleepless night, watching and waiting to take her to hell with him...And now Lis is Praying for Sleep.