Starred review from January 20, 2003
Fans of Deaver know that he works storytelling magic in his thrillers, not just the Lincoln Rhyme tales (The Stone Monkey, etc.) but also the stand-alones (The Blue Nowhere, etc.). It's fitting, then, that in his new, giddily entertaining story about quadriplegic crime fighter Rhyme, he casts as his villain a professional illusionist—and an apprentice magician as assistant to Rhyme and Rhyme's cop sidekick–lover, Amelia Sachs. The novel opens with the murder of a young female student at a music school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Caught in the act, the killer vanishes from a sealed room. Forensic and eyewitness clues point to a culprit with magic training; looking for expert help, Sachs encounters an aspiring illusionist, who goes by the stage name of Kara, who agrees to help her and Rhyme. The villain—revealed in passages from his POV as "Malerick," soon identified as a world-class magician with a serious ax to grind—commits further mayhem (including an attack on Rhyme), which looks like steps toward an act of consummate revenge. A subplot about a white power demagogue's attempt to assassinate the Manhattan D.A. who's prosecuting him grows to involve Malerick, giving the storyline twists—and twists and twists, through Deaver's masterful sleight of hand. Further subplots concerning Sachs's attempt to attain a sergeant's ranking, and Kara's relationship with her stroke-addled mother, as well as the customary difficulties of Rhyme's condition, add ballast to the gyrating main story line, rich in magic lore and lingo. This is prime Deaver. (Mar. 11)Forecast:With a 300,000 first printing, plus Deaver's ever-growing reputation, booksellers should expect magic with this title, as they stock it on shelves only to see it disappear in the blink of an eye.
November 15, 2002
Deaver stalwarts Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs battle a particularly gruesome killer they dub "the conjurer."
Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 2, 2003
Not since Bill Bixby's The Magician
has illusion played such a vigorous role in the investigation of a homicide. A girl is murdered, the killer is caught red-handed, then trapped in a sealed room with a hostage. A shot is fired and when the room is entered, it is empty. Deaver (The Stone Monkey; The Devil's Teardrop; etc.) summons up a fifth tale in the Lincoln Rhyme series and loads it with his trademark twist and turns. Rhyme, a quadriplegic forensic criminologist, seems to have met his match in his new foe, dubbed "The Conjurer" by the police, a master of sleight of hand, illusion and misdirection, much like Deaver himself. Grupper does a fine job of keeping the thriller on the rails, and his depiction of Malerick, a villainous master of disguise straight out of a comic book (he regularly disappears in a flash of light and smoke), is riveting. Grupper's skill with gender and accents is marvelous. The structure of the book is nicely formatted for audio, as the killer narrates his own "performances" as if he were a ringmaster announcing the latest trick, using phrases like, "And now, revered audience...." Simultaneous release with the Simon & Schuster hardcover (Forecasts, Jan. 20).
December 15, 2002
Often, it's the details that help solve crimes, and no one does detail better than Deaver, particularly by way of the forensic expertise of Lincoln Rhymes and Amelia Sachs, most recently paired in "The Stone Monkey "[BKL Ja 1 & 15 02]. When a student is found dead, the clues lead Amelia and Lincoln on a hunt for a magician--an escape artist, no less, who also happens to have the talents of sleight of hand and illusion on his side. Amelia and Lincoln enlist the aid of Kara, who studies under the mysterious master magician David Balzac. As more dead bodies pop up accompanied by the same calling card, the team homes in on the perp, dubbed the Conjurer. As Kara tells it, all magic comes in two parts: effect and method. The effect is what you want the audience to see, and the method is the technique used to elicit that effect. This theme continues throughout the novel; wheelchair-bound, introspective Rhymes compares this duality to his crime-solving process, and the bulk of the book is divided into two like-named parts. Well-researched and exciting, this has all the elements of good crime fiction: likable leads, a colorful supporting cast, fascinating scientific analysis, and a look at the secrets of an otherwise unknown world. A sure hit. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)