Customer Reviews

The Twelfth Card (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I have been a Lincoln Rhyme fan every since I saw THE BONE COLLECTOR, then realized there was a mystery/thriller series by Jeffery Deaver featuring the same character. There's something about a paralyzed forensics expert who solves complicated cases with the aid of a beautiful redheaded sidekick that fascinates.

That said I've always had some reservations about Deaver. He loves the wild plot twist for one thing, and that's still the case with THE TWELFTH CARD. Through most of the book we think the attempted assault on Geneva Settle, a high school student doing research at the Museum of African-American Culture and History, has something to do with her ancestor, Charles Singleton, an emancipated slave who'd inherited land from his former master. But that's too easy for Deaver. Soon we're dealing with Arab terrorists, bombs going off right and left, and two or three more people trying to kill Geneva. It's all a little too much for the patient reader.

Then there's the matter of ebonics (I can't remember the more politically correct term). Every African-American character in the book sounds the same, including Geneva Settle, when she's around her friend Keesha and a potential boyfriend. Can you say the word s-t-e-r-e-o-t-y-p-e?

The saving grace in THE TWELFTH CARD is the villain, Thompson Boyd. He's a professional hit man who's been "numbed" by his profession. What's interesting is that he's trying to cure himself by cohabiting with a woman and her two little girls. He figures if he goes through the motions of family life, some of their normalcy and zest for life will rub off on him. Thompson goes down a bit too easy about a hundred pages before the end of the book, again because of Deaver's penchant for the wild twist.

Despite the reservations mentioned above, I highly recommend this book. The Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs team is top notch; the police procedural (with its recurring evidentiary lists) is fun to follow, and the cast of recurring characters, including Fred Dellray, Mel Cooper, Lon Sellitto, and Thom, Lincoln's physical therapy aide, are all well-rounded and interesting. If you haven't read any of the other five novels in the series, you're in for a treat.

When I learned that a new Lincoln Rhyme novel was due out in June I was elated along with many of our library patrons. Jeffrey Deaver and his stories are greatly anticipated by many of our patrons.

In The Twelfth Card teenager Geneva Settle is attacked and nearly killed while doing research in a library in the City. Chased by the assailant she narrowly escapes. She eventually ends up in front of Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs where she is debriefed and put in protective custody. It is this part of the book that seems contrived. Lincoln Rhyme is a high powered piece of manpower. If he were used to investigate every suspected assault on a teenager he wouldn't have any time for other crimes. Of course WE know that there is a major crime to be prevented/solved because we can see the book. However, Lincoln doesn't know that this isn't just what it looks like, a possible attempted sexual assault.

Aside from this minor point, The Twelfth Card is everything we have come to expect from Jeffrey Deaver. The Twelfth Card is a great story with more than its share of plot twists. The plot is believable and keeps the readers turning the pages.

Finally, Deaver continues to offer fresh stories that rely on good authorship. This is refreshing considering some of the trite and contrived novels being published by other authors.

I just finished reading this book and i feel somewhat torn. Although i found the story very interesting and entertaining, at times I felt a few of the characters and dialog were a little unbelieveable. I was also annoyed at some of the subtle philosophical themes hidden throughout the story.

Deaver goes into great detail developing the characters. I thought Boyd was incredibly interesting - especially with the inner torment of trying to become normal again. The conflict within is mirrored by Selitto's own bout with feelings of inadequacy on the job and Jax's conflict of street thug versus legitimate member of society.

Another aspect that I give high marks for is Deaver's penchant for twists and suspense. Towards the end of the book, it seemed like every page had some sort of misdirection or twist in it.

However, I felt the story was hurt by unbelieveable dialogue and situations. For some reason I couldn't connect with Rhyme or Sachs. The Ebonics dialogue smells like something that someone researched, not lived though. Even so, it's hard to quantify such a rapidly changing dialect into print without sounding cliché and dated.

I also felt that a lot of the situations were unrealistic at times. For instance, i doubt a real Crime Scene unit would have the witness, Geneva, present for so much of the investigation.

Aside from minor unbelievability, i still enjoyed the story. I was slightly annoyed at some of the philosophical underpinnings. In many cases Deaver's political views were a little obvious and it was hard for me to empathize with the heroes of the story when I didn't believe in what they were doing on a fundamental level. i'm not looking for a political debate. All i'm saying is that when you let your own politics color the story, it's going to hinder a person with differing viewpoints from connecting with the story.

I am an avid Jeffrey Deaver fan and particularly his Lincoln Rhyme books and waited with much anticipation to read this book. However, although still well written and fast paced with clever plot twists, I found that this book was rather formulaic and for the first time actually guessed some of what was going to happen before it did. I didnt feel particularly sympathetic towards the main character Geneva Settle, who seemed to be unlike any teenager I have ever known. All her friends seemed to be stereotypes that you see on TV. Thompson Boyd on the other hand was a fascinating character, I found myself really wanting to know more about him and why he was the way he was. In my opinion, if this is the first Deaver book you have ever read it is a great read and I recommend it, although some of the back references may be confusing. However, existing fans I think you will be disappointed.

Can I just say that this Pocket Star edition is for the birds? Is it Pocket Book's way of making customers cough up another few bucks for a new bottle for old wine? The format of the book, now fully twice as tall as it is wide, is appallingly difficult to hold onto, and when a book sprawls acrosss 530 pages it simply falls out of your hand.

That said, THE TWELFTH CARD is another superior Jeffrey Deaver outing for his quadriplegic superman Lincoln Rhyme and his redheaded fashion model super girlfriend, Amelia Sachs, never more loveable nor brave as she is here. I could read about them solving the mystery of who wrote the Magna Carta. Here they take on a 140 year old case that (yawn) is supremely uninteresting, even when Deaver pumps up the bellows to blow smoke up its rear end to liven it up. There's not much he can do, the Charles Singleton case is one of his failures. However its modern counterpart is quite exciting. Geneva Settle, the 16 year old at the heart of the case, is a mystery wrapped up in enigma. Trained assassins are sworn to eliminate her, and yet she blithely plans to go back to school the next day and also to work her shift at McDonalds.

What's great about Deaver is that he never does the same thing twice and here he decided to try something genuinely new, give us a cast of black urban characters and work from the inside out. The horrifying thing is that they all talk an improbable mixture of "ebonics" and hip hop slang from about 15 years ago. You have to give it to him for trying, where most white novelists just evade the whole race issue by refusing (or "preferring," like Bartleby) to write black characters. But Deaver is wack, fat, word and def. If I heard about the benjamins for the 100th time I was going to fling the book through a basetball hoop. Luckily he stopped at Benjamins #94.

Geneva's hatred of Harlem, and her preference for reading John Cheever over Claude McKay, is "unsettling" to say the least. But at least Deaver is trying!

When is it going to come out that Lincoln Rhyme is black himself? That would have added another layer of meaning to an ambiguously racialized text. Denzel played him, after all, superbly!

Mr. Deaver's "The Twelfth Card"--the title refers to the twelfth, the hanged man, card of a Tarot deck--is another of the author's Lincoln Rhyme novels and it's one of the best. Rhyme, the wheelchair bound criminalist, and his lover, Detective Amelia Sachs, must this time find out who wants to kill a (rather annoying) African American teen named Geneva Settle, who is trying to find out the fate of one of her ancestors, a freed slave who moved to New York, and was accused of a crime.

Regular readers of Mr. Deaver's novels know that in his books nothing and nobody is ever as it would seem--not even the meaning of the hanged man Tarot card--and newcomers quickly catch on. Scenes that begin innocently end in action while what appears sinister sometimes turns out not to be.

We learn quickly who the perp is--and he's one of the more interesting Deaver creations--and the suspense is all about when Rhyme's team will identify him, locate him, and apprehend him. Deaver knows New York City and police procedure well. And he knows how to surprise (there's even a final kicker tucked into the author's note at the end), although he always plays fair. The clues are all there for you, and the loose ends all get tied up.

Notes and Asides: The publisher has chosen an unusual format for this edition. It's slightly longer (maybe an inch or so) than the standard-issue small size paperback, but no wider. (It'll stick a little farther out of the top of your coat pocket but will still rest easily inside it. The good news is that this format allows a slightly larger font size. The paper is thicker too. Thanks!

The trick to all great writing (and especially to great genre writing) is to do old things in fresh ways. The tried and true, without novelty, is dull and predictable. The truly 'novel', lacking an anchor in nature and convention, is simply weird. No one understands this better than Deaver, who characteristically combines fresh material (usually forensic material, but sometimes historical material) with the key elements of thriller/suspense. In THE TWELFTH CARD he even adds one of the chestnuts of traditional fiction, the appearance of a mysterious stranger, who enjoys a special relationship with one of the central characters. My only reservation is that he also, characteristically, includes at least two 'unexpected' twists and turns as the narrative moves to its conclusion. Since he does this consistently, the plot twists lose their impact, at least for his devotees (among whom I count myself), who come to expect them.

If you're a Jeffery Deaver fan, I think you'll agree that The Twelfth Card is a good, entertaining mystery -- just not up to par with other books in the series. While the story maintained my interest from beginning to end and the plot (which is described in detail in some other reviews) had several twists and turns, I felt that this book didn't have me glued to the edge of my seat -- as I've come to expect to be from Deaver. Perhaps this is due to the series becoming somewhat formulaic, and so I've become used to things not being what they seem. Or perhaps the book was just a good read but not an excellent one; which, again, is what I've become used to from Deaver. The basic plot starts off very strong and continues that way until about the last third of the book. At this point, Deaver becomes a bit too gimmicky with his 'surprises', which, while I didn't guess most of them, weren't super exciting or plausible. Despite these criticisms, The Twelfth Card is worth reading and one that I think will help make a visit to the beach or a plane ride a more enjoyable experience.

The Twelfth Card is another in a long line of great Lincoln Rhyme novels, where both the action and the suspense build into a book that you cannot put down.

The book follows the case of an attempted rape that leads to murder and a 100 year old crime. While investigating the current threats against a smart (both book and street) high school student (Geneva), Rhyme and Sachs must also uncover what happened to her great uncle. The story is filled with twists and turns that are a hallmark of a good Deaver novel.

As always there is a little back story about Rhyme fighting against the medical world to test him or like in previous books, try some experimental treatment. This time I think it fits in very well to the story and adds to the over all enjoyment of the story.

This series is not getting old or stale for me. Each story is interesting and the growth of Rhyme in dealing with his limits and the future is always interesting.

So with all of these good comments, why not 5 stars? Well, I thought that the ending was sort of obvious, and I was able to figure out the mastermind prior to the big reveal, so that is why I knocked it down to 4 stars. All in all a good quick and interesting read that I would highly recommend to fans of Deaver and readers picking up a Rhyme novel for the first time!

Like the NY Times Book Review of June 12, I too thought Jeff was off his game in this edition of Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs' romps. While the two of them are as entertaining as ever. the history lesson seems stiff and isn't weaved into the story well. Too bad, because the rest of the book is excellent. Rhyme has met his match in the person a little girl, and the reader will delight in his discomfort. Finally, there's somebody in addition to Thom who is immune to his grumpiness.

Good read, but not as rewarding as some of its predecessors.