An excellent empty room mystery.
It begins at a prestigious music school in New York City. A killer flees the scene of a homicide and locks himself in a classroom. Within minutes, the police have him surrounded. When a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot, they break down the door. The room is empty.
Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation. …
jefferydeaver.com
I have to wait a year for each new novel in the Joe Pickett series.
#23 Storm Watch dropped Feb. 28th, 2023.
It went to #1 on the NY Times list as well as Publishers Weekly.
All of these books are good. And Storm Watch is as good as the best.
Fans like me love Joe and his family. Good people in the midst of rightwing, rural Wyoming.
And we are intrigued by his buddy Nate Romanowski, a rogue falconer.
When a prominent University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries while hunting down a wounded elk on his district as an epic spring storm descends upon him.
First, he finds the professor’s vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then Joe finds the professor’s frozen and mutilated body.
When he attempts to learn more, his investigation is obstructed by federal agents, extremists, and Governor Colter Allen.
Nate Romanowski is rebuilding his falconry company—and financing this through crypto mining with the assistance of Geronimo Jones.
He’s then approached by a shadowy group of local militant activists that is gaining in power and influence, and demanding that Wyoming join other western states and secede from the union—by force, if necessary. ..
It’s quite surprising that a TV series based on these books has happened yet. One recent attempt was quashed by Box.
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie has 4 detectives and 4 possible suspects playing bridge after dinner.
At the end of the evening, Mr Shaitana is discovered murdered.
Who dunnit?
The victim had bragged to Hercule Poirot that he admired criminals who have evaded justice. Successful ones.
Had he deliberately invited killers to dinner?
If you like Jack Reacher, you’ll like war veteran Peter Ash.
This is the 7th book in the series. The best, I’d say. But the bloodiest.
In this one, Ash is driving through northern Nebraska when he encounters a young pregnant woman alone on a gravel road, her car dead.
Peter offers her a lift, but what begins as an act of kindness soon turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse chase across the lonely highways with the woman’s vicious ex-cop husband hot on their trail.
The pregnant woman has seen something she was never meant to see . . . but protecting her might prove to be more than Peter can handle. …
NickPetrie.com
Elly Griffiths’ third Harbinder Kaur mystery.
I like Hardbinder. A 38-year-old detective inspector who’s still living with her Sikh parents — and still hasn’t told them she’s a lesbian.
BUT in this book, Hardbinder finally moves out because she has accepted a new position in the Big Smoke, London.
Her first case is a murder at a school reunion: Garfield Rice, an eminent MP.
Sadly, I came away disappointed. I want to know more about Hardbinder — but chapters are told from the point of view of different suspects. Some unreliable. I didn’t care about any of them.
Agatha Christie would have been disappointed in the resolution of the murder mysteries, as well. It really isn’t very brilliant.
Hopefully book #4 will be better.
The Empty Chair is a crime novel by Jeffery Deaver, published 2000.
It is the 3rd novel in a series featuring Lincoln Rhyme; the first of which was made into a movie, The Bone Collector.
Lincoln Rhyme is in North Carolina with his aide Thom and his companion and partner Amelia Sachs in order to receive experimental spine surgery, which may improve or further worsen his C4 quadriplegic disability.
Whilst there they are approached by a local police sheriff and asked to help in a local case of kidnap and possible rape. They believe the kidnapper to be a local orphaned boy ‘Garret’, the ‘insect boy’.
I have to admire Deaver for being able to write a successful crime scene investigator who is confined to a chair. How does he come up with these plots?
It is well written, interesting, and well researched. Many plot twists as I’ve come to expect from Deaver.
Quite good. Better than I expected.
I’ve not yet cancelled J.K. Rowling though her legacy won’t be Harry Potter — it will be her weird transphobic attacks on transgender people.
I say weird because for most of her life Rowling has advanced philanthropic causes. The charity Lumos. She worked for Amnesty International documenting human rights issues.
In fact, 95% of her works have been for the greater good.
Why ruin that attacking transgender people?
Weird.
I’ve read some of Rowling’s complicated statements claiming she’s not attacking and harming trans people. Clearly she is ➙ Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.
I thought the book Troubled Blood was least good of the first five.
But the 6th book — Ink Black Heart — was dreadful. I didn’t finish it.
So … how is the TV adaptation of Troubled Blood?
Dark. But quite watchable, actually.
Strike is marginally less annoying. Robin is lovely, as always. Nobody can understand what she sees in Strike.
There is some good acting from the rest of the cast, many of them elderly.
Some touching moments.
The cold case murder mystery didn’t do much for me. Though the ending was well done.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Independent – Strike: Troubled Blood review – This drama should be cherished. It’s the BBC at its best
The Bone Collector is a 1997 thriller novel by Jeffery Deaver introducing Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic forensic criminalist.
HOW does a quadriplegic solve crimes?
He has to be a genius.
This is an excellent book. It was fun to see how Rhyme first meets his future partner, Amelia Sachs. She’s a bit of a disaster as a NYPD Patrol Officer — but Rhyme sees potential.
The killer is well written, as always with Deaver.
And there are plenty of twists and turns to the plot.
It was adapted for Hollywood in 1999, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
NBC had a TV adaptation, as well, that I haven’t seen. It looks even better than the film though it got low ratings. They’ve changed the book to be more entertaining. But only lasted 1 season.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, 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.”
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 Chinese community.
The Final Twist (2021) is the 3rd book in the Colter Shaw series.
Just hours after the harrowing events of The Never Game and The Goodbye Man, Colter Shaw finds himself in San Francisco, where he has taken on the mission his father began years ago: finding a missing courier bag containing evidence that will bring down a corporate espionage firm responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths.
Well researched. Well written. Interesting premise.
Some fun Deaver plot twists.
But ultimately I was not all impressed with this book.
I wish Deaver was a better story teller.
I wish his characters were more real. I might care about them more.
Rick McCharles 