The novel depicts a frantic race to save lives and catch a killer, is filled with colorful and interesting characters, fascinating clues and riddles, gruesome crime scenes, and wild chases, and tricky plot twists. It's not flawless, for reasons I will detail below, but it's a pretty good read and it kept me up late, reading right until the fist-thrustingly juicy ending.

To the scores.

The Bone Collector
Plot: 7
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 6
Horror: 6
Suspense: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7.5

A lot of good scores, but nothing great. If the novel had ended 30 pages earlier, I would have scored several categories at least a point higher, but it got a bit ridiculous as the ending turned into one twist after another, and when the killer was at last revealed and his purpose detailed, it turned out to be contrived and somewhat ridiculous.

I'm not going to go over every score, as I sometimes do, but I will talk a bit about the plot and characters, before doing some quick comparison to the film version of the novel.

Characters

The main character is Lincoln Rhyme (who is not a rap artist, though his name would be perfect for one), a brilliant criminologist who was paralyzed in an accident while working a crime scene. His new protégé is Amelia Sachs, a beautiful ex-model turned cop who doesn't want anything to do with working crime scenes and gets involved with the Bone Collector case entirely against her will. That at least gives her something in common with Lincoln, who just wants to die and is pulled into working on the case against his will. He is suicidal since he's grown steadily more depressed in the four years since he was crushed by a collapsing roof and paralyzed from the neck down, with the exception of one finger.

Before his crippling accident, Lincoln was the best criminalist imaginable, and while he can no longer do any physical work himself, once he's working on the case he sees every bit of evidence with incredible brilliance, making deductions no living human could ever pull off. It works in the novel though, simply because he keeps doing it time after time, and he's never wrong. Well, almost never, and of course his very few mistakes are key plot points, but I'm not going to reveal those here.

While Lincoln is on the side of the police, he clearly serves a sort of Hannibal Lecter role, guiding the investigation of the pretty, young, female investigator as she passionately pursues the bad guy and tries to save people and make the world a better place. Amelia Sachs is the Clarice Starling character, and while she's not interested in working the investigation, Lincoln likes her spirit and keeps pushing her into the investigation and sending her in first to detail the crime scenes. Supporting them is an army of other cops and feds, some of them sympathetic to Lincoln (who is now a civilian who technically shouldn't have anything to do with the case other than reading about it in the papers) and others resenting him and his style and wanting to take over the investigation themselves.

Lastly we've got the killer himself, and while his style is somewhat inventive, his motivations, when they are finally revealed, are pretty flimsy. He's also not interesting during the story, since he acts very mechanically and stays on his planned script, but not in a way that's robotic enough to be scary just for the blank, inhuman nature of it. He's also inconsistent; crazy and obsessed and half-living in turn of the century New York sometimes, but completely a part of the modern world at others as he passes for a normal person and avoids suspicion. It's not done in a schizophrenic way though; he's just shown as crazy in the scenes from his POV, and perfectly normal at other times, when other people observe him (before they know he's the killer, I mean).

He is definitely the least-realistic character in the novel, and while we eventually get an explanation for what he's doing and why he's doing it, it doesn't ring very true and feels like the best thing the author could think of, rather than something intrinsic to the character. Buffalo Bill did weird shit in making his woman suit, but you never questioned his motives for doing it, and he didn't waste 90% of his time taunting the police just to prove how clever he was.

Overall, I liked the characters in The Bone Collector less the more I read. By "liked" I mean how I felt about the author's technique in presenting them; not how I personally felt about any of the characters. Personally I didn't much like or dislike any of them, which is a problem in of itself. The characters in The Bone Collector are interesting and varied, but the reason I only awarded a 6 on this one was that they felt like characters in a story, rather than real people. They constantly do wacky or quirky things, but only because that's what the story requires of them, and there's really nothing to any of them other than what we see in the story. No one seemed to have any irrelevant traits or ticks or a background history, and they basically just never felt very real to me.

To compare to something classic like Silence of the Lambs; in that story Lecter is obviously a character created for a story, but he's fascinating nevertheless.  The rest of the characters however feel very real. Clarise Starling, Dr. Chilton, Barney, Buffalo Bill, etc. No matter how weird they are, they felt like real people to me, with lives beyond what we see of them in the book.  In The Bone Collector, everyone is like Hannibal himself; characters stocked with wacky traits because they'll make the story interesting. They do, and the story is interesting and none of the characters are terribly annoying, but none of them are unpredictable or surprising or full of passion either.

Plot

The plot is very contrived, but intentionally so. A brilliant maniac is snatching people off the streets of NYC and sticking them weird places to die. At the death scene of each person he leaves clues that will lead the police to the next spot in time to save that person, but of course the clues are very hard to decipher, and it's only thanks to the incredibly-brilliant deduction of Lincoln that they ever find any of the crime scenes, much less get there in time to save the lives of some of the people. Honestly, the clues are so weird and tricky that in the real world the cops wouldn't even know they were clues, and would never even find the bodies, since they were usually left to die in some very out of the way location.  I've always heard that New York is very crowded and busy, not to mention hard to drive around in traffic, but apparently it's actually quite easy to drive a cab with screaming kidnap victims in the back, or carry corpses around, or lead handcuffed people down into abandoned warehouses, all without being seen by anyone.

If you suspend your disbelief about the plot elements, it's a very fun book. I enjoyed it a great deal, though I wasn't caught up in the story until nearly the end. Unfortunately it's near the end when the plot really goes wacky, the twists start twisting, motivations are revealed, and the disbelief gets heavier and heavier. I did not buy the last couple of twists at all; they felt forced and almost unnecessary, like the author was outsmarting himself by trying to do too much. They didn't ruin the book, but they did turn it a bit cheesy and silly near the end, since I never seriously doubted that they good guys would win and survive. 

Novel vs. Movie

I've not seen the film, and Jeffrey Deaver had nothing to do with it other than profiting from the sale of movie rights, but apparently the script made a lot of major changes in the story, especially near the end, and judging by the reviews, they weren't very good changes. The Bone Collector film is sitting at just 27% positive, with 22/82 on Rotten Tomatoes, but while most of the reviewers didn't like it, they didn't really hate it either. That impression is strengthened by the score on MetaCritic, where it's got a 45 average, a high of 70, a low of 38, and tons of scores of about 50. No one seems to love or hate it, and most just think it's okay for a Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller rip off.

I don't know much about the movie's style, but they seem to make some major plot changes; the most important of them that Lincoln, the brilliant quadriplegic CSI guy is actually eager to get in on the case in the film. In the book he wants nothing to do with it, and in fact is spending most of his time trying to convince his various doctors to euthanize him, since after 4 years he's sick of being trapped in his paralyzed body.  They changed Lincoln's race also, turning him from a white guy into Denzel Washington, but I can't see that making much of a difference. His nurse changed race and gender also, from the no-nonsense tough love male nurse of the novel to Queen Latifah in the movie, but that shouldn't make much of a difference either. The female lead is a model-beautiful redhead in the book who is played by Angelina Jolie in the film, and that at least seems like pretty consistent casting, irrelevant details like hair color aside.

The main thing I'd worry about the movie version losing would be all the scientific and intellectual tidbits, and apparently it did. In the book the CSI equipment is described and explained in amazing detail, as are the precise and exacting methods of examining a crime scene, researching evidence, etc. The main thing I took away from reading The Bone Collector is how watered down and imprecise and cowboy the science and techniques are on the CSI TV shows. Lincoln the book character worked with a precision and intelligence that makes the guys on CSI look like bumbling amateurs, and the depth into which the book researches the tiniest clues is just amazing and fascinating.

I recommend reading the novel to see all the details, but just to give an example: vacuuming up the bits of stuff from one scene they find a tiny shred of plastic wrap (they have to microscope it just to figure that much), figure that it came around a leg of lamb, figure the killer would only shop in major stores and not small ones since he wants to stay anonymous, figure he would only buy a few things at once since he lives day to day, and figure he would shop close to home. From that they call every supermarket in NYC, find how many had a leg of lamb sold in the last 2 days to a person whose total order was five items or less, send investigators to the dozen stores on that list to buy a leg of lamb, and from comparing the plastic wrap they figure out exactly which store it was, and know to further narrow their search for his house to that section of the city.

That is by no means the most interesting or cleverest of the half doze or so such cases in the book, but it was one I could relate without being very spoilery. The book is full of other such examples, and that's what I really enjoyed about it; seeing the clues, seeing what the killer was doing next, and reading about how the cops turned their weird clues into facts they could act on.

I enjoyed it, even with the cheesy ending and other flaws, and have no problem recommending the book. Better yet, it was a best seller in 1999, so your local library is quite likely to have a copy. Deaver has since written five other novels starring Lincoln and Sachs, and while I'm not going to hit the library tomorrow to dig into them, I will put them on my list to read someday.