The Twelfth Card

The title of this book refers to the twelfth card of the tarot, The Hanged Man. The card “indicates spiritual searching leading to a decision, a transition, a change of direction.”

Love the personality of Lakeesha! Great character! And Kara the illusionist is back from the previous book! This case has a lot to do with Harlem, Civil War era New York, and the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s also got hitpeople, a terrorist, and a nearly hundred and forty year old secret for Rhyme and company to chase down! It's a good read, but a bit of a let done from the previous Lincoln Rhyme book. Still, #7 here I come!

This book is as intricate and layered as an ancient Egyptian mummy and, like a mummy, its jewels are slowly revealed as the coverings are peeled away. Miss Marple was an elderly spinster who loved gossip and knitting; Nero Wolfe was a fat, orchid-loving gourmet cook; even Inspector Morse is a musical, Jaguar-driving alcoholic. Jeffrey Deaver’s detective, Lincoln Rhyme, is a modern counterpart of those Golden Age sleuths, a brilliant, morose quadriplegic whose assistant, policewoman Amelia Sachs, is his legs and eyes.

Rhyme is also assisted by the fact that, in fictional New York, civil servants are not only civil, they actually serve. In the course of a single morning, a hole is burrowed under a building to retrieve possibly vital show more evidence, a DNA test is completed, and numerous search warrants are procured. But The Twelfth Card is not all science and methodology, though — it is full of twists and turns, with a villain so ruthless and calculating that nothing is as it seems. The book delivers on many levels. There are fascinating insights into society in Harlem, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), graffiti art, US constitutional amendments, and the benefit of an exercise regime to a quadriplegic. Solving a crime through scientific analysis of forensic evidence can be as dry as dust, but in the hands of a good writer like Deaver, it is as exciting as a search for buried treasure. show less

The Twelfth Card is the sixth book in the Lincoln Rhymes series by Jeffery Deaver. This series is showing how brilliant a writer that Deaver is and he is great at wrong footing the reader and throwing a twist into the story you do not see coming. Even when you know that there will be a double twist in the story it is still surprising when you get to each one and in this one he shakes it up by placing a third one into the story.

Geneva Settle is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in Harlem, New York and she is a straight A student. One morning she is in the library doing some research into one of her ancestors when she hears a sound which alerts her and feels that something is wrong. When she witnesses an attack on the exact spot, she was sat show more at she runs off which alerted the person to her presence who chased after her. Geneva manages to raise the alarm and the police who when they arrive on the scene discover the crime scene and a little further away another crime scene where a rape had taken place.

Rhymes and Sachs are called in to try and solve the present-day case with Sachs walking the crime scene acting as the eyes, ears and nose for Rhymes. Little did they realise that in the process of the investigation they would also have to solve a one hundred- and forty-year-old crime. They also find that someone today is trying their best to keep that crime as a forgotten crime. There are also a number of people who are searching for Geneva Settle, and she does not feel safe which Rhymes and Sachs have to act upon. Will Geneva survive all the attention?

Another brilliant Lincoln Rhymes thriller that grips you from beginning to the end. Deaver at his best. show less

This is another of the Lincoln Rhyme series. Not one of the best or maybe I'm just tired of them. I did read this one with my ears which made it a little easier to get through and I did get to the end. Someone is out to kill Geneva Settle, a 16 year old exemplary student. The first try was while she was doing research in a library. Lincoln and his group figure out nearly right away that the bag left behind to make the scene look like an attempted rape as well as a murder was just a front. This case took all manner of twists and turns before the end.

This book took a while to read but not because it was dull...apart from time, you find yourself early on reading slowly to take in the scores of clues and information being fed to you as not doing so will catch you out later when something is figured out.

The story starts with an attempted murder of a teen girl in a public library, and soon escalates to a murder of the librarian and an injured bystander. The apparent motive is attempted rape, but then strangely takes on a cultish lead and then changes tack to a crime from 140 years previously. As I allluded to, you need to be on your wits with this one as the plot changes almost with every chapter with clues in abundance - but which clues are genuine and which are 'planted'?

Enter the show more brilliant Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic expert which an attitude - if you have seen The Bone Collector, he was played by Denzel Washington...and as good as that movie was, this book is better.

I have never read a thriller that throws you off the scent so many times and I challenge anyone to solve it before it is revealed...

There is not much I can find wrong with this book - not ruined by romances, Hollywood staging, nor complex plotting. You do need to get up to speed with street talk quite quickly though as this book is riddled with it (being based in Harlem). The portrayal of the hit-man is done perfectly to the point you cannot help but admire by his murderous trade.

A must read. show less

This was a very convoluted and fluid plot that kept me guessing. Thompson Boyd was a cool customer. Meticulous and careful, he led them around for a while, but then through Rhyme’s equally meticulous and careful deduction, he was caught fairly early in the book. After a few chapters discovering who hired Boyd, I thought the rest of the story would focus around the older mystery. Wrong. It became unpredictable and pretty interesting. Not perfect, but a good outing for Rhyme & Co.

"The Twelfth Card" never captured my attention and I struggled with it from the start. It was out-dated with the use of Motorola phones and AltaVista as as search engine, and there were so many red herrings in the latter half of the book that they became ridiculous. I was also annoyed at the attempt of African American Vernacular. It had me wincing on more than one occasion.

I thought the novel would have had more appeal with its links to slavery in the 1800s, but even that failed to hold my attention. "The Twelfth Card" was not my first Lincoln Rhyme book, but it was certainly the worst.