Reviews for additional books in the series will be added here over time, should Deaver continue churning them out. The following are almost entirely spoiler-free, with far less revealed about the plot than the back cover blurbs or your average Amazon.com review.

My individual reviews follow, but as an introduction allow me to touch on a few elements in the novels that are consistent throughout the series. All of the novels have basically the same story structure, and all star the same two main characters.

Lincoln Rhyme is a forensic analyst who worked for the NYPD until he was paralyzed from the neck down when a building collapsed on him as he was working a crime scene. The accident left him paralyzed from the 4th cervical vertebrae, with movement of his head, neck, and right ringfinger only. He has plenty of money though, and with the best high tech voice recognition computer equipment and powered wheelchairs and such he can move around and continue his CSI-style forensic work, though he is no longer a member of the NYPD. He can also breathe and eat on his own, but has no control of the rest of his body and needs constant medical monitoring. There's at least one scene per book where he stays up too late and overworks himself and nearly dies because of it, and there's a running subplot where Rhyme is suicidal over his paralysis, or is about to risk death in some sort of experimental surgery to possibly regain more mobility. The fact that he'd starred in five books by the time I read the first one pretty well stole any suspense from those developments, though. 

Amelia Sachs is his love interest and co-worker. An active duty officer in the NYPD, Amelia is a gorgeous redhead who was a high fashion model until she retired from that world and became a cop, just like her dad before her. She's a championship pistol marksman and a very gung-ho cop, one who had no interest in joining the CSI team until Lincoln basically forced her into it. Since the first book she's grown to like it though, and now works all the most important crime scenes, while still finding time for high speed driving and reckless chases. She has at least one life-threatening shoot out with the bad guy per book, though the fact that she's starred in five books pretty well steals the suspense from such situations, in retrospect.

While Rhyme and Sachs are the main characters, there are half a dozen other cops of various types who work with them in every novel, as they and the entire NYPD tackle some impossible case and Lincoln matches wits with a brilliant maniac in a race against time.  Each book features a different villain, and in every case but one, the bad guy is far more tricky and dangerous than he seems. Since the main characters and Deaver's writing are pretty much the same in every book, the plot and the bad guys are really what makes or breaks these novels, and those are the areas the following quick reviews will focus on.

It's important to realize before you start reading these novels that they are not mysteries. They're sorted in the mystery section of the book store/library, and the happenings in the stories are mysterious, but they're not really mysteries. They are thrillers, police thrillers, CSI thrillers, whatever you want to call them. Each book presents a mystery to be solved, but it'll be solved by the characters in the book, not by you, since you never have enough clues to solve it yourself. You get some clues, and see the characters working on the cases, but you learn just enough to be impressed when Lincoln makes yet another brilliant deduction and solves a puzzle just in time to save innocent lives. The books always have action galore, wild chase scenes, and lots of plot twists; they're fun books, but they are not whodunits, so don't go in expecting to match your wits to an arcane series of clues, since you'll come up empty. Just read along and enjoy the ride and the twisting revelations.

In fact, there are often too many plot twists; so many that you never quite believe anyone is who they say they are. After two or three books you will no longer believe that anyone but a few long-time characters are who they say they are, and will suspect every new character of secretly being the bad guy. Thinking everyone is in the rogue's gallery makes for some fun reading, but at the same time you never really get surprised, since you always know something is about to happen.  Even if it's something you would have never expected, you were expecting something.

These aren't bad traits, and I enjoyed them a lot in The Bone Collector; the first book in the series and the first one I read. The problem is that every novel has them, and by the time you've read 3 or 4 or 5 of them you no longer believe what you're being told, and wait for the other shoe to drop. In a way, whatever Lincoln Rhyme novel you read first is always going to be the best one, since that's the only time you'll really be surprised by all of the twists and tricks. I don't see any way out of this for Deaver either; readers expect the twists now, so even though the twists aren't really surprising they are required. If Deaver wrote a more straight-forward novel and left out the twists it would be surprising, but readers would feel cheated by the lack of the plot elements they've grown to enjoy.

That being said, it's really best if you read The Bone Collector first, then read the rest in whatever order you like, since nothing much about the main characters changes after the first novel. The Bone Collector spends the most time introducing them and gives the most background information, and for better or for worse, Deaver spends very little time playing catch up with background info in the other books in the series. I liked that he didn't spend pages re-explaining who everyone was, but if you jump right in with book 3 or 4 or 5 you'll probably spend some time wondering who the miscellaneous cops helping out on the case are. Not that it really matters. Nor does it really matter that none of the characters every grow or change in any way. Time passes, and the specifics of their lives change a bit, but these five (so far) cases could take place a week or a decade apart; there's no way to tell by how the characters grow, since they do not.

As for Deaver's writing... eh. I've never read a phrase in the entire series that I stopped to savor, but I've never groaned aloud at the awfulness of anything either, and I pretty frequently do just that with best selling authors. He's pretty formulaic in his writing and characters, but he describes things clearly, keeps the stories popping along, and really, who cares if he's a brilliant writer?  He does do something right, since I can't recall ever reading books (maybe the Harry Potter novels) that go by so quickly. Several times with these books I considered going to bed and finishing the next day, looked and saw that I had 90 or 100 pages to go, pressed on, and found myself turning the last page less than an hour later. They're page turners, and the simple prose goes down very smoothly. 

That's not an insult: these are fun, trashy thrillers full of terrorists, mass murderers, insane magicians, and the stalwart cops who hunt them down. The writing is good enough to get the job done, and really, it's better than it needs to be. I've never felt really attached to any of the characters, but I haven't been pushed away by the writing either, and everyone's reading these novels for the plot anyway.

These are my original scores for the first novel in the series. You can see my full review of The Bone Collector here, as it was originally written; the comments below were written along with the rest of the reviews for books 2-5, in April 2005. I've not changed my Bone Collector scores since the original review, because I decided to use them as a baseline for the other novels in the series. Another book has a better plot than this one? It gets a higher score. Another book has less-interesting characters than this one? It gets a lower score in that category. And so on, though most of the scores are more about gut feelings than numbers calculated in any quantitative fashion.

This novel has more of a polished feel to it than the others, with more desperate, violent, vicious characters, and more jagged lead characters. It's also the only novel with a strong horror element, and can be accurately compared to Silence of the Lambs in a number of ways.

The Bone Collector, by Jeffrey Deaver (1997)
Plot: 7
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 6
Suspense: 6
Horror: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7.5

The Bone Collector is the novel that introduces us to all of these characters, and brings them together into an effective crime-fighting team. It was also the first novel I'd read in the series, and was therefore the one that had the most effective twists and surprises, if only because I wasn't expecting them. The setting is NYC, the bad guy is a murderous lunatic, and though he's not especially believable, he's very colorful and creative. Every victim is chained somewhere, and will die in a few hours in some unpleasant way. Better yet, at each scene the killer leaves a set of bizarre clues that might lead Lincoln and his team to the location of the next victim in time to save their life; if they can only decipher the clues in time.

This book cheats very little on the deduction, and you see how Lincoln figures things out by analyzing the dirt particles, discovering what sort of leaf was left as a clue, guessing what a metal shaving might be, and so on. You'll never figure it out as you read along, but it's fun to watch the brilliant character pull solutions from thin air. This is a technique that Deaver gets much lazier about over the rest of the series, so enjoy it while it lasts.

The bad guy in this one is sort of a stock serial killer, with a few differences in motivation, and though his weird habit of leaving them clues and not killing people immediately is eventually explained, it's sort of a flimsy explanation. It feels contrived, rather than organic or realistically-motivated by a crazy character, and while I enjoyed the surprise last twist ending, it's pretty ridiculous too.

Still, this one has about the most clever plot, in terms of the puzzles that must be solved, and I enjoyed it. It's also got by far the most horror elements, and in fact is the only book in the series that I've scored for horror, since all of the rest are full of violence and danger, but since they aren't horror novels even to the extent that an FBI thriller like Silence of the Lambs was, I didn't bother to score them in that category.  None of the books in this series are scored on humor either, since while there are some funny lines and a few laughs, they are few and far between, and that's not the tone Deaver was aiming for anyway.

Lastly, I may yet redo the scores in this review at some point, if/when I get around to rereading this novel, now that I've got books 2-5 to give it a jaded comparison to.

The Coffin Dancer, by Jeffrey Deaver (1999)
Plot: 8
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Suspense: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 7

This novel is a more accurate representation of the direction the later books takes. The Bone Collector was more horror and Silence of the Lambs in style, and played things straighter with the serial killer hunt. This novel, and the ones that come after it, never stop twisting, and always include several last twists that yank the rug out from under your feet time after time through the last 50 pages. In light of that, enjoy the twists in Coffin Dancer, since after this one you'll never expect anything to be even remotely how it seems, and will therefore never really be surprised again.

Coffin Dancer takes place in NYC, with Lincoln trying to protect some federal witnesses who are ready to testify against a very bad man. A bad man who has apparently hired someone to kill them; the Coffin Dancer, a notorious hit man who never fails and never gives up on a target once he's agreed to a job. Lincoln and the other NYPD cops have been waiting for him to come back to town for years, since he killed several police who were chasing him back then, and they are ready to get him, even though no one knows what he looks like, other than by the huge coffin tattoo he is purported to wear on one arm.

The plot of this one is intriguing, if a little hard to believe, as the Coffin Dancer tries time and again to kill the witnesses, in ever more elaborate ways, as the cops move them from one protected location to another. You can not believe the ways they try to trap him, the ways he gets out of their traps, and the ways he comes back with another near kill on the targets. It's a great game of cat and mouse, though some of the escapes are disbelief straining, and it's never quite clear who is the cat and who is the mouse. Perhaps Lincoln is the dog chasing the Coffin Dancer cat as he chases the witness mice, but since the Coffin Dancer uses him self as bait to draw them in several times, and since Lincoln uses himself as bait to draw in the Coffin Dancer... it gets all confused.

The plot twists in this one are particularly outrageous, as everything you know gets turned upside down at least twice, and the surprise endings just keep on coming.

Empty Chair, by Jeffrey Deaver (2000)
Plot: 5
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Suspense: 4
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 5.5

This story takes place in the backwoods and swamps of the American South, when Lincoln is in North Carolina for an experimental back surgery, and the local cops ask him for some help with a bizarre kidnapping case. Lincoln, with his famous disinterest in the lives of lesser human beings, doesn't want to get involved, but when he eventually does as a favor, he is handicapped by a lack of quality lab equipment, and by working in a location that he knows nothing about.

This story doesn't suck, but it was easily the least interesting of the five (so far) for me. The main problem is the overall case, which starts off interesting with a crazy, bug-obsessed teenager kidnapping and murdering people. The kid is a nice change of pace from the polished and professional murderers of the first two books, but he's clearly no match for Lincoln's wit, and it's no surprise when Lincoln's posse is soon closing in on him.  The book tries to surprise with plot twists as the case deepens, the conspiracy widens, and Amelia goes on the run and pits her wits against Lincoln's as he tries to capture her before she gets herself into real trouble.

There's more to it of course, but the bigger bad guys aren't revealed until near the very end, after several hundred pages of a somewhat wandering plot, and the stakes just generally felt a lot lower in this novel than any of the others.

I must admit to being fooled by this one several times. I knew Amelia wasn't going to die, not with three more novels on the way, but I couldn't see any way for her to get out of the trouble she was in at the end. Still, though the novel was tricky, it wasn't very engrossing, and I took longer to read this one than any of the other books in the series. It's not as bad a book as my scores might indicate, but since my scores are relative to the other Lincoln Rhyme novels, it suffers accordingly.

The Stone Monkey, by Jeffrey Deaver (2002)
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 6
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Suspense: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5

Malaya's least favorite of the novels, but one I enjoyed. I was surprised and glad to enjoy it too, after the disappointing Empty Chair, and when she read this one before me and didn't like it, I was afraid the series might have jumped the shark. Not so, at least for me.

The plot concerns a Chinese smuggler named the Ghost, an evil "snake head" who smuggles Chinese people into America for a price. He's a mass murderer and drug/weapon smuggler too, which is why the FBI and INS are after him, and why they get Lincoln Rhyme to help out on the case. The Ghost proves remarkably-resourceful though, and after he escapes the Coast Guard at sea and blows up the tanker he was riding on, he does his best to kill every one of the Chinese he was smuggling. Why he's doing this and why he keeps at it, even after two of the families have escaped into NYC's Chinatown, is an interesting story, and this one has one wild escape and chase after another, with the typical Deaver twisting twisting twist ending. It's also got one of the most interest co-star characters of the entire series, Sonny Li, a Chinese undercover cop who (appears to be) bound and determined to bring the Ghost down. Li is of great help in the investigation, sharing much inside knowledge of Chinese culture that's all of great use in tracking the Ghost, though I suspected Li of ulterior motives the entire book, just because that's how every character in a Deaver novel is.

The Stone Monkey has the benefit of the big late main plot twist (as opposed to the requisite character twists and sub-plot twists) being a clever one, and one that you could actually have maybe guessed in advance, from the evidence presented. The lack of that sort of option is something that hinders most of the Lincoln Rhyme novels for me, since they aren't mysteries in any sense of the word. They're thrillers, but after The Bone Collector, Deaver stopped including enough clues for the reader to make any deductions, or even to guess along with the characters in the novel. You read them and you don't know what's going to happen, and you can sometimes guess simply because you know something has to be twisty and tricky, since it always is. You only find out when it happens though, and there are half a dozen times per book when a chapter ends with Lincoln pondering the inscrutable evidence, the next chapter starts from the bad guy's POV as he executes his foolproof plan, and then good guys suddenly save the day from nowhere, an event that is followed by an explanation of the new evidence and brilliant analytical leaps Lincoln made in order to save the day at the last instant.

The twists make sense, once they are explained, but you can't deduce them yourself since you don't have all the evidence available to sift through, and when they are explained afterwards, as the cops helpfully fill the bad guys in on how they caught them, you enjoy it, but feel sort of cheated. That's how they work for me at least, which is why I say these aren't really mysteries, though they're very good thrillers.

My main objection to this one was the amount of time spent with sub-characters who we never really cared about. The time Deaver spent on them was meant to make us care about their lives being in danger, but it never really came together for me, and I just wondered how they could catch the Ghost on an intellectual level, rather than because I wanted the innocents to survive. Which is why I don't give this one a very high score in suspense.

The Vanished Man, by Jeffrey Deaver (2003)
Plot: 8
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 8
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Suspense: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 7
Overall: 7.5

Probably the best one of the five so far released, since the plot is very clever and the bad guy is fascinating. In every Deaver book he researches something, and then works that into the plot. In the Bone Collector he researched old New York City, and gave the bad guy vast antiquarian knowledge. In Coffin Dancer he tied in snipers and military training with the bad guy assassin. In Empty Chair he learned all about bugs, and made the crazed teenager a bug expert who set traps based on bug techniques and spouted off National Geographic type facts about insects all the time. In The Stone Monkey Deaver learned all about Chinese culture, medicine, feng shui, people smuggling, Chinatown, and more, and worked all of those into the story.

All of those fields of specialization were excellent additions to the novels, but this one is the best.  "Vanished man" refers to an old and very dangerous magic trick, and the bad guy this time is a crazy and extremely-talented magician. He can pick locks, he can escape handcuffs, he can change disguises in a second, and he's killing people with recreations of famous magic tricks, except in his versions they are victims, not volunteers. Helping Lincoln out is the requisite expert co-star, a young female magician named Kara who knows most of the tricks of the trade and advises them on what The Conjuror might be doing next. Or is that just what he wants them to think he's doing next, and the feint has a feint calculated to hide his true intentions?

The twistiness of this one's plot seemed a little hard to believe at times, as did The Conjuror's incredible repeated escapes and skills, but if you can buy the superhuman talents of the man it's great fun to read about him and the magic he uses. The overall plot works nicely as well, as the requisite "unimportant subplot that eventually turns out to be related and key to the main plot" ties in nicely, as well as providing yet more clever plot twists. Plus the craftiness of this novel isn't a cheat; you know enough that the Conjuror's actions and Rhyme's pursuit mostly make sense, though both of them are better at their work than you can believe, in retrospect.

Of the five novels, this is the one I'm most likely to reread for pleasure, since even though I'd know the plot twists, I just enjoyed reading about the magic and following along as good guy and bad guy dueled. I also liked that the plot made sense in the end, and that the clues given early on paid off.  This one contrasts well with Empty Chair, a novel in which you've got virtually no chance to guess at the overall plot or how it all ties together, since you only find out about everything long after the fact.

The Twelfth Card, by Jeffrey Deaver (2005)
Plot: 6
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Suspense: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6

I like that the story remains in NYC, where all of his best Lincoln Rhyme stories have been set. I liked that we had another fiendishly-clever and relentless assassin, much like the one in The Coffin Dancer. And I liked that there wasn't too much time wasted on non-essential bullshit or subplots.

On the downside, the assassin wasn't unique or especially interesting, and since much of the novel was told from his POV, there wasn't the usual mystery about who he was. His true motives were of course kept obscured until the twisty conclusion, but that's par for the course, and it worked pretty well. I didn't much care for the victim in danger, a young black schoolgirl, and I didn't especially like the "Deaver's latest research project" tie in, contemporary Black-American street culture.

As Deaver always does, lots of the book was devoted to explaining and elaborating on his research area, and while past books have done that very well with Chinese culture in the US, or insect information, or magic, this one was all about how black urban youth interact and think.  It wasn't horrible or anything, and much of it was actually pretty interesting, but it often felt very shoehorned in, and artificial. Like Deaver had finished the novel and then been presented with a scholarly research paper on how black teens in NYC think and interact, and he decided he had to work that in at the last minute. So we've got numerous sections told from the perspective of a bookwormish female black teenager, and in them she's describing in great detail why black people "snap" (insult each other in a back and forth fashion) on each other. Or what it means when a guy says X or Y, and when a girl wears this or that. I have no opinion on the accuracy of the information, but the way it was presented was so fake, in a "this character would never think anything like this at this time" sort of way. A better writer would have just described things and found ways to explain them to the reader. Deaver just had half page blocks of explanation, as if the character were writing a term paper, for outsiders to read, on her environment.

My other main complaint about the novel was how much Deaver cheated to keep the suspense alive. He always does that, not revealing things his main characters have thought about until they actually do it, so there's always a scene with a bad guy sneaking up on the good guys, and at the climax we find out it's a carefully-constructed ambush, set up by the good guys with seconds to spare. Then once the bad guy is caught, we get the explanation.

That happens several times in The Twelfth Card, but the part that bothered me was different. Since we're in the mind of the hit man for long stretches of narration, and he's thinking about everything he's doing, it feels like you've been cheated when eventual revelations come about. Since things happen later on (I'm being vague to not be spoilery.) that the hit man would obviously have been thinking about the entire time. It would be like if there were two bad guys, and on the last page of the book one suddenly arrested the other one and turned out to be a cop who had been under cover for the entire novel, and that Rhyme, Sacks, and the other cops had all known that and been secretly-communicating with the undercover officer all along.  Mystery writers can trick their audience a bit, but the audience doesn't like to feel completely manipulated. And I did, at least a little bit, as the final plot twists unfolded in this novel.

Furthermore, this novel loses points by not having much suspense, and for not being a mystery. It's a straight thriller, and it's fun to see how the girl narrowly survives numerous attempts on her life, but the ultimate mystery of the story comes completely out of the blue. There aren't any hints given about it as the story unfolds, and therefore the big twist at the very end feels phony and irrelevant. Who cares about the big twist when we had no foreshadowing for it or anticipation about it in advance?