Reviews of The Stone Monkey by Jeffery Deaver

Book Summary

Recruited to perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln and Amelia manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City, carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as "the Ghost."

Lincoln Rhyme returns!

First introduced in the spine-chilling novel The Bone Collector, Lincoln Rhyme dazzled readers with unparalleled forensic sleuthing -- all done from the confines of a wheelchair. A famed criminologist, paralyzed from the neck down, Rhyme compensates for his physical disability with his brains -- and the arms and legs of his brilliant and beautiful protégée, Amelia Sachs. It is Amelia who "walks the grid" for Rhyme, acting as his eyes and ears for the famously dangerous and difficult cases chronicled in Jeffery Deaver's bestselling novels The Bone Collector, The Coffin Dancer, and The Empty Chair.

Now the awe-inspiring duo returns in The Stone Monkey. Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln and Amelia manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City and carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as "the Ghost." But when the Ghost's capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race against time: to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who have escaped from the ship and vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of New York City's Chinatown.

Over the next harrowing forty-eight hours, the Ghost brilliantly and ruthlessly hunts for the families, while Rhyme, aided by a quirky policeman from mainland China, struggles to find them before they die, and Amelia Sachs pursues a very different kind of police work -- forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may have consequences going to the core of her relationship with her partner and lover, Lincoln Rhyme.

The Stone Monkey abounds with Deaver's famous trademarks: wholly unexpected plot twists, breakneck pacing, and characters who are heartbreakingly real, reminding us once again why People hailed him as "the master of ticking-bomb suspense" and Publishers Weekly called him the "most clever plotter on the planet."