The Twelfth Card

The Twelfth Card - by Jeffery Deaver

Another Lincoln Rhyme book.  A good one.  Very good.  Great?  Mmmmmmm….don’t know if I would say that.  Maybe it depends on how many of these books you’ve read before.  Jeffery Deaver’s favorite recurring character, Lincoln Rhyme, is a quadriplegic criminalist. A former detective who was darn good at what he did, managed to suffer a major injury on the job several years ago, and he’s now basically restricted to solving crimes in his lab in New York City overlooking Central Park.  Fortunately, his brain his so good at solving unsolvable crimes, that he really doesn’t need the rest of his body.

Geneva Settle is a poor, yet very smart, high school student living in West Harlem.  On a personal level, this poor young girl has almost nothing going for her.  When she’s spending a Saturday in an African-American museum researching one of her ancestors - a hero of the American Civl War, she barely escapes being murdered as she’s sitting at a microfiche machine.  So the questions arrive at Lincoln and his team of regulars.  Who?  Why?  What clues are available?  And so the hunt is on.

Here’s where things do get a bit monotonous for one who has read these Lincoln Rhyme stories before.  It must be said that Deaver does do a good enough job mixing things up a bit - his villain is very well developed character wise, and is a bit of fresh air from some of the usual psychopaths that Deaver uses that seem to be obsessed with insects, bones or some other weird fetish.  Many other aspects of this book, however, seem somewhat repetitive, or not quite believable.  We know for example, that when the good guys are closing in on the perpetrator’s hideout fairly early in the story, that the villain has some sort of devious mechanism in place that will allow him some sort of miraculous escape.  We’ve simply seen such things happen many times before to be fooled again.

Then, for once, the obligatory Jeffery Deaver plot twists don’t really seem to work as well here.  There are a couple of abrupt 90 degree turns in the story that fans now expect, yet the author was obviously very dry with good ideas this time for most of the story.  You know nothing is as it seems when things seem to be nicely wrapped up yet you still have about 100 pages of story left to read.  Deaver seems as though he’s trying a bit too hard to make things work and, for once, probably shouldn’t have tried so hard to fool his readers and just focus on a linear plot.

Then, the character of Geneva is a bit of a stereotypical stretch.  You would think a young high school girl who is being chased by a murderer would be scared out of her wits, yet nothing seems to faze her.  “I can’t stay hidden - I have to go to school to take a test!”  We hear this quite often.  Talk about dedication.  The dialect between her and her Harlem friends seems awfully forced in the Ebonics area as well.  The author is trying very hard to be hip and/or accurate, but it just comes across as embarrassing.

Still, though, to compare this book to the rest of his works almost seems a bit unfair.  I still enjoyed the story overall, and although there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary diversions, I felt that the story was overall positive.  It seems as though Deaver devotes about half of his literary library to Lincoln Rhyme, and when he writes about something else, he always does a great job as well.  Reading this book almost makes me wish that he’d retire from Lincoln Rhyme for a bit, but it could be just a minor setback.

Even though I really did like the book, I’d recommend any of the other prior Lincoln Rhyme stories before this one. It’s not really necessary that you read them in order, but there a few instances in the books where certain things are revealed that move the overall saga along.