The Kill Room

The Kill Room – by Jeffery Deaver

Recently I transferred all of my book reviews from my blog (about 275) that I started 5 years ago over to the book site ‘Goodreads’. Of course, I couldn’t help rereading what I had written about several of the books.  I’ve read a lot of Jeffery Deaver, and I found myself repeating myself whenever I would review a Deaver novel.  I consistently stated something like “This book is very similar to every other book he’s written, and I’m getting a bit tired of the formula. You might enjoy this book if you haven’t read much by Deaver, but if you’ve read a lot, you’re likely to feel he’s repeating himself.”  

Sadly, this is exactly how I felt when I read this novel.

Another Lincoln Rhyme story. I really do enjoy reading about Linc and his constant companions, but the formula wears thin after several books.  Lincoln is a retired “Criminalist” who specializes in the evaluation of evidence left behind at a crime scene.  Lincoln is retired because he is a quadriplegic.  He suffered a horrible accident before this series started, and he’s confined to a motorized wheel chair. Because of his immobility, a lot of the action in these stories takes place in his brain since a quadriplegic can’t really travel to that many places very easily.  In this book, Lincoln DOES actually get out of the house to a crime scene in the Bahamas for a few pages, so the formula expands ever so slightly. Still, though, when the story telling is limited by a character who is highly immobile, it does tend to limit the potential.

Give Deaver a bit of credit for trying to color outside the lines a bit and try to be as different as possible. Instead of some bizarre twisted maniac terrorizing the streets of New York City, this story deals with a highly placed government agency who is carefully (yet illegally) murdering individuals that they see as a threat to the way of life in the United States.  The ‘Kill Room’ is the location where the trigger is pulled when the initial act of murder is committed.  Since this is a government agency, the ‘kill room’ can be quite far from where the actual victim meets his death.  This makes the investigation a tad more complex. Again, Deaver is trying to be different.

A minor letdown for me is how the story progressed. There are some Deaver stories where you feel the plot is quite weak and isn’t really that interesting, yet Deaver is a master of throwing curve balls at the reader during the last quarter of the story or so.  Things are rarely as they seem.  In this story, this didn’t seem to be the case. In fact, I thought the overall story was quite good, yet when I didn’t see the Deaver ‘twist’ near the end, it somewhat diminished my enjoyment.

Most of the recurring characters are the same. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, because your brain doesn’t have to assimilate too many new characters as you feel you already know them quite well. It’s not so much a good thing when some of the characters have traits that seem unnecessary and/or annoying, such as Lincoln’s beautiful ‘partner’ Detective Amelia Sachs.  She has a lot of quirks that we get to hear about over and over again that really don’t add anything to the story. It seems she can’t resist speeding in a hot rod of her choice through the crowded streets of Manhattan, nor can she resist picking at her scalp until it bleeds. We read about this a lot. I’m not sure why the author thinks these elements are necessary to the story.

A good book, but I feel as though I’ve read most of this already. Maybe my problem is I’m trying to read too many of Deaver’s books over too short a time frame.  Maybe I’ll wait a year or so before I tackle the next one. By then, the story might not seem as redundant.