Spoilers!
Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are just the best, and I need to read all the books involving them, along with the usual supporting cast of characters. In Jeffery Deaver’s 2013 book, The Kill Room, we’re also introduced to a righteous prosecutor, Nance Laurel, who fit perfectly with the group. Rhyme has quadriplegia after an accident, and Sachs has a terrible form of osteoarthritis affecting her hips and knees, which they both persist forward with, and throughout the series, they’ve certainly faced their fair share of external threats from suspects. Arguably, in The Kill Room, though, they both face one of their strongest threats from a serial killer obsessed with the culinary arts.
It starts with the Bahamas, and the seeming sniper killing of Robert Moreno, and the collateral deaths of his bodyguard and a journalist interviewing him. Moreno is an American. That’s what brings Nance into the fray; she believes a rogue government leader fabricated intelligence in order to kill someone deemed not patriotic enough. Now, Rhyme and Sachs are tasked with finding the sniper and the clean-up man. The latter turns out to be the serial killer, and he’s cleaning up on a separate track from the sniper and government, but with the same motive: stopping the investigation. That puts Rhyme and Sachs in peril when the “clean-up man” tries to clean them up. Rhyme actually travels to the Bahamas, which it was neat to see Deaver put Rhyme in a different location, and Rhyme nearly dies. But in a beautiful moment, his long-time caretaker, Thom, saves his life. This after Rhyme was unable to fire the gun to save Thom’s life because his finger wasn’t strong enough to pull the trigger. I loved that whole sequence and character development for Rhyme and his relationship with Thom. Meanwhile, the serial killer is specifically hunting Sachs (and Nance, for that matter), with her narrowly escaping an IED explosion at a cafe, and a climactic knife fight with him (get it, he’s a chef, he loves his knives!).
Turns out, it wasn’t a sniper per se, but a drone equipped with a rifle, and the sniper was safely back in New York City. The weapons manufacturer is the one who employed the serial killer to clean up the mess because it was the weapons manufacturer who fabricated, and furnished, the bad intelligence to the government, so that the government would need to use their weapons, thus keeping them in business. But also, the weapons manufacturer wanted Moreno’s bodyguard dead because the bodyguard was blackmailing him.
My only critique of the book — other than Deaver’s incessant use of the word “datamining” — is that the hot-head government official who ordered the assassination of Moreno, an American citizen (although technically at the time of the killing he seemingly denounced his citizenship), was right all along about Moreno! Moreno was in bed with terrorists and planning a terrorist attack, which Rhyme obviously foiled. Same with the next individual on the kill list. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point about “bad intelligence” if the intelligence was actually right? And I wanted Nance to be correct in her righteous indignation at the U.S. government trampling on the Constitution and due process. Alas.
That critique aside, I, of course, loved this book because as I said, I love these characters and Deaver’s clever twisting and suspense-building abilities. In fact, what’s marvelous about Deaver, and one of my favorite aspects of these books, is periodically throughout the book, he will allow us to see the “whiteboard” of evidence that Rhyme and Sachs are compiling about the case or cases, and the clues for the later twists and reveals are typically right there in the evidence listing! Yet, we miss it, obviously.
If you haven’t added The Kill Room to your Rhyme/Sachs catalogue, then I highly recommend you do so!
Milam's Musings 