Customer Reviews

Cold Moon, Large Print

5 star:		(62)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Jeffery Deaver's newest story The Cold Moon feels a lot like his first Lincoln Rhyme novel The Bone Collector. Both stories deal with serial killers that have a taste for slow and unique deaths of their victims. Both killers like to bait the police and leave unique clues. I loved The Cold Moon for the same reason I became a hooked Deaver reader after The Bone Collector....Deaver delivers your monies worth with each page. He is like no other writer today.

In The Cold Moon Amelia Sachs, Rhyme's key investigator, and Rhyme must match wits with the Watchmaker, a killer that leaves a clock with each victim. In the course of the investigation, we discover that the killer purchased ten clocks leading the investigators to conclude that there is to be ten victims, not a pleasant thought given the killer's taste for suffering.

Deaver gives us more information about Amelia's history adding depth to her character. He also introduces Kathry Dance an investigator from the California Bureau of Investigation. Kathryn can smell a lie before you tell it. Deaver is a master storyteller who manages to deliver one twist after another and paces The Cold Moon with the reader in mind. I was surprised in the end.....

Chalk up another hit for Deaver.

In their seventh adventure, Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs square off against a criminal who calls himself "The Watchmaker," a master assassin who gives new meaning to the phrase "a riddle wrapped up in an enigma"--you'll spend a lot of time trying to figure out what his game is, but to no avail. That's because The Cold Moon is quintessential Deaver--just when you're patting yourself on the back for having figured everything out, the author, through literary sleight of hand, throws you one of his trademark curveballs, keeping his heroes and his readers in a constant state of confusion and agitation right up until the very last pages of this swift paced and surprising thriller. Although this is what Deaver has become famous for, he seems to be having more fun than usual with the canny and devious Watchmaker, an observation borne out by the unusual ending the author provides.

Another character in The Cold Moon who seems to have found her way into Deaver's heart is consultant Kathryn Dance, the human lie detector who plays a key role in helping Rhyme and company frustrate the machinations of the Watchmaker. Dance, who works with the California Bureau of Investigation, is an expert in the field of kinesics, the science of body language, nonverbal gestures, postures and facial expressions by which a person manifests various physical, mental or emotional states, and communicates nonverbally with others. Deaver has told Mystery Scene magazine that he's already hard at work on a stand alone novel featuring Dance, tentatively titled The Sleeping Doll. If her solo adventure proves half as interesting and involving as the one she just shared with Lincoln Rhyme, readers should reserve their copies now.

No spoilers

I'm a huge fan of the Rhyme series and have enjoyed every book so far, rating each one at least four stars. However, I just can't do it for this one. My issue with this book was that all of the typical Deaver plot twists and turns and the "I didn't see that coming" occurrences were all packed into the last 1/4 of the book. In all of the other Rhyme books, there are twists throughout that keep you glued to it and turning the pages, but in The Cold Moon they just aren't there until the last stretch. Then, once you do get to the surprises, they stretch belief almost to it's breaking point.

If you're a Deaver fan, you have to read this book of course because it is the first to feature Kathryn Dance, the main character of his new series (the second book of the Dance series comes out in June 2007), who is presumably going to be taking the place of Lincoln Rhyme as the main protagonist in Deaver's books.

It isn't the best of the Rhyme books, and it hurts to only give it three stars being such a loyal Deaver fan, but it's was the low point in all of the Rhyme books in my eyes.

I've been following the Lincoln Rhyme series ever since "Bone Collector" and this is another great addition. One of the best things about all of Deaver's novels is the character development. Each of the characters is distinct and memorable (good or bad).

The villain this time is a serial killer named the Watchmaker. I can't really say more than that without giving away the extremely complicated plot... and with that I have to say that this isn't Deaver's best work simply because the plot is too complicated. Twists and turns are his trademark, but this got so complicated I had a hard time following. Nonetheless, a great read.

In one respect COLD MOON does what a good mystery should: the villain, The Watchmaker, an apparent serial killer, is every bit as clever as forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme. On another level, COLD MOON reads like one of those "B" movie serials they used to make during the forties, where the good guy gets into a bar fight and never loses his hat. Jeffery Deaver will do anything, and I do mean anything, to prevent his mysteries from becoming predictable. But there's such a thing as author intrusion, where we can see Deaver tampering with a logical turn of events. Eventually this sort of thing strains credulity.

You could say Deaver is a formulae writer. He loves those forensic lists, that a compulsive reader like myself, just has to read, but they seldom add anything new, and I was tempted to skip them. Deaver also borrows a page from Ed McBain, running two cases simultaneously. Amelia Sachs is in charge of a homicide investigation that sometimes conflicts with Lincoln's Watchmaker cases. Tension ensues.

There's a new member of Rhyme's team as well. Kathryn Dance, kinesics expert. Kinesics is "the science of observing and analyzing body language and verbal behavior of witnesses and suspects." She's almost as good at what she does as Lincoln is at forensics, a little too good to be believable. Up until he pulls one of his switches, Deaver seems to be trying to say something about time, how it speeds up when you're having fun and slows down when you're miserable. The watchmaker leaves a clock at each of his crime scenes to emphasize the point. Deaver drops the time angle the first time he's tempted to pull one of his patented twists; then there's the crooked cop angle. There are a bunch of them in COLD MOON, including Amelia's father and her ex-fiancé. When she finds out about her father, she's so crushed she decides to leave the force. Will Amelia break up the greatest crime-fighting team since Sherlock and Watson?

I've read all of the Lincoln Rhyme mysteries, and I obviously enjoy them or I wouldn't keep coming back for more, but I've always had a hard time with Deaver's twists. At one point in COLD MOON, after Rhyme had once again foiled The Watchmaker, Deaver explains how Rhyme managed to ignore one of the Watchmaker's diversions, an attempt to steal something called the Delphic Mechanism, a fancy clock the Watchmaker would have killed for. Essentially he says that The Watchmaker was too smart to leave so many clues, so he kept on looking until he found what the Watchmaker was really after. Convenient, very convenient.

You may know a little bit about lunar calendars and the names associated with the full moons therein like the Harvest Moon, the Hunter's Moon, the Green Corn Moon, the Sprouting Grass Moon etc. Well the Full Moon closest to the Winter Solstice is called the Cold Moon. That works well in the northern hemisphere which is convenient since this book is set in New York City which is currently located in that hemisphere. Many people seem to think that the Cold Moon is the moon of death. That also works well with this book since murder is the apparent main theme of this tale.

This is a real page turner with multiple plot twists which I will not tell you about since that is the fun part of reading this book.

To the brilliant mind of Lincoln Rhyme it becomes apparent early into the murder investigation that there are two killers involved, working in tandem and perhaps one in slave to the other. A ticking clock is left at the first puzzling murder scene at the docks, and it at first appears as if someone has been suspended until their painful death finally relieves them of their agony. It's nasty, and its attention grabbing to a city that will always forever after be hyper aware of the danger in the every day. A careful killer is calling himself "The Watchmaker", but for the investigating team that all seems a little obvious. There are plenty of crime scenes, but where are the bodies?

Police forensic consultant and former Detective Lincoln Rhyme as always feels immense frustration that he is not out there with his team, walking his own personally devised murder scene "grid" and so must take some satisfaction in that his best eyes and ears, Amelia Sachs, is out there to do it for him. Sachs has her eye on some future goal that might not involve police work, and this is despite the fact that she is riding her first case as Lead homicide Detective. Some of those in the department have always wanted the bright Amelia Sachs to fall from a great height and when her current case leads her down the road into her father's own policing past, she is more able to understand why.

Deaver is a master at suspense, and the ticking clock element to this novel is only a small part of that. There are always so many layers to the Lincoln Rhyme novel that it's delightful to have the knowledge that an early answer will never be THE answer; Deaver we expect to always work the suspense screws skifully right up until the final pages. This is a better novel than the previous one or two in the series which puzzled more than entertained. THE COLD MOON is more tightly crafted with greater cohesion between merging plotlines (which there always seems to be) and less extraneous elements are involved. This series isn't read for the warm and fuzzy character development and stripping it all back down to the action of the escalating hunt has made for a far better read.

On the flip side of this some of the personal issues have been dragged out too far in the series and need to be dealt with. Fans of the series need to have resolution on teasers that were introduced many novels ago, and a retrospective novel probably wouldn't be a bad inclusion either (not an original thought, but would probably be timely).

If you haven't read a Jeffery Deaver novel before, THE COLD MOON would give you a good feel for the series and Deaver makes solid work of providing enough supporting information to enable his books to be read as stand alones. A great book in a stellar series that still has no peer.

In his books, Jeff Deaver likes take a particular topic and attempt to educate his audience on it while telling his story. In the Blue Nowhere we learned about the computer industry and hackers, in The Twelfth Card he focuses on the culture of inner city high school kids, their slang and subculture. In Cold Moon we learn about Kinesics, or the science of observing and analyzing people's body language and speach patterns to determine how truthful they are. Throughout the book the Kenesics expert Kathryn Dance interviews a number of witnesses/suspects using these techniques. These passages are some of the most interesting moments in the book. It was a joy to see Dance systematically break down various subjects into revealing what they were hiding or to help them remember some minute detail about a crime.

The only problem I had with the book is for the first two thirds of the book it is a pretty straight forward serial killer hunt (where the killer does not seem to be that smart). But then there is a big twist that makes you see that everything you knew about the case was not what you thought at all. That was great. But then they switch it on you again with another twist. Ok, I can live with that. Then they do it again and again to where Deaver weaves such a complex series of double crosses and chance occurrences that it makes the story almost unbelievable. All in all it was a good read but in the end it seemed to of gotten a little out of hand in my opinion.

What a marvelous effort by Deaver in the Lincoln Rhyme series. The intricacies that were woven throughout the entire novel should absolutely amaze you as a reader. He is like a magician with his latest effort. Do you see his sleight of hand when he gets you to look one way, and then seems to pull the rug out from under you as the plot turns a different direction. The sub-plots are incredible from dealing with the psyche of Amelia, meeting her possible replacement, finding the merger of kinesis with forensics, and so on. The list is endless.

The addition of Kathryn Dance - an expert in kinesics adds a new dimension and seems to develop a softening of the edges around Lincoln. You can't tell if Deaver is planning to use her as a replacement for Sachs or as a recurring character in the future as the book goes along. With each page, you want to know where are you being led.

This latest novel is about a number of subjects and Deaver seems to handle each one of them with aplomb. We find a new member walking the grid for Linc and we can't help but wonder how he will be developed in the future. As you read the book, you see a number of the key characters in peril at the end of chapters and wondering about their outcome.

In the book we see the development of Linc and Amelia, as well as some newcomers. We see a different side of Linc and those who have read all of the books in the series should enjoy it.

This book is the best in the series to date, and like a finely tuned watchpiece, it continues to keep perfect time. I dare you to try to put this book down.

All I can say is that let's hope that time marches on to the release of another chapter in this series in the near future.

The Watchmaker is a serial killer who leaves a clock behind at the scene as his signature. And he is meticulous in his efforts to leave no trace behind. He is so good that famed Amelia Sachs and Lincoln Rhyme are completely stumped and reluctantly admit that he is the best they have ever gone up against. But what they don't realize is that he is even better than that. In this latest Lincoln Rhyme installment, the good guys chase their tails more than ever in their efforts to catch the bad guy. But just when you think you have it all figured out....enter a different bad guy. And just when you have THAT all figured out....enter another bad guy. Are the killings random? Are they even murders? The secrets just keep on building up through the last page.

After a bit of a disappointment, Deaver is back with a page turning thriller that is as good as, or better, than his previous Rhyme books. Once again, there are multiple layers that continue to build up to the very end. He also continues developing the personal relationship between Sachs and Rhyme and addresses the conflict they have between their personal and professional lives. All the familiar characters make an appearance and a few are even added. It all combines to make a great thriller that will entertain and leave you wanting more.