The Burial Hour

Forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme is back with his most harrowing case yet in this newest installment of Jeffrey Deaver's New York Times bestselling series. A businessman snatched from an Upper East Side street in broad daylight. A miniature hangman's noose left at the scene. A nine-year-old girl, the only witness to the crime. With a crime scene this puzzling, forensic expertise of the highest order is absolutely essential. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate. Soon the case takes a stranger turn: a recording surfaces of the victim being slowly hanged, his desperate gasps the backdrop to an eerie piece of music. The video is marked as the work of The Composer... Despite their best efforts, the suspect gets away. So when a similar kidnapping occurs on a dusty road outside Naples, Italy, Rhyme and Sachs don't hesitate to rejoin the hunt. But the search is now a complex case of international cooperation--and not all those involved may be who they seem. Sachs and Rhyme find themselves playing a dangerous game, with lives all across the globe hanging in the balance.

In his classic thriller The Bone Collector, Jeffery Deaver introduced readers to Lincoln Rhyme-the nation's most renowned investigator and forensic detective. Now, a new killer is on the loose: a criminal inspired by the Bone Collector. And Rhyme must untangle the twisted web of clues before the killer targets more victims-or Rhyme himself. The killer's methods are terrifying. He stalks the basements and underground passageways of New York City. He tattoos his victims' flesh with cryptic messages, using a tattoo gun loaded with poison, resulting in an agonizing, painful death. When a connection is made to the Bone Collector-the serial killer who terrorized New York more than a decade ago-Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are immediately drawn into the case. Rhyme, Sachs, and the NYPD must race against time to answer the many questions the investigation uncovers: Whom will the killer attack next? What is the message behind the victims' tattoos? Does the killer's own inking--a fanged centipede sporting a woman's face--hold any significance? And what is his ultimate mission? As time runs out, Rhyme discovers that the past has returned to haunt him in the most troubling way imaginable...

Reowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme is pitted against Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protegee, as they disagree on the analysis of a crime they began working together.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TELEVISION EVENT FROM NBC, STARRING RUSSELL HORNSBY, ARIELLE KEBBEL, AND MICHAEL IMPERIOLI. “Lincoln Rhyme is more relentless than ever” (People) and Jeffery Deaver delivers “supercharged tension” (USA TODAY) in this New York Times bestselling suspense masterwork. NYPD criminalist Lincoln Rhyme joins his beautiful protégée Amelia Sachs, in the hunt for the Coffin Dancer—an ingenious killer who changes his appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims. They have only one clue: the madman has a tattoo of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a coffin. Rhyme must rely on his wits and intuition to track the elusive murderer through New York City—knowing they have only forty-eight hours before the Coffin Dancer strikes again. This is a “heart-stopping” (Booklist) thriller from #1 international bestselling author Jeffery Deaver’s “simply outstanding” (San Jose Mercury News) Lincoln Rhyme series!

COPYCAT? OR REVENGE? They have never seen a murder like it. A talented tattoo artist is using poison instead of ink. His victim is a young woman. And on her skin he's left a message: 'the second'. Drafted in to investigate, NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme and his associate Amelia Sachs find the scene has been scrubbed of evidence. All except for one trace - a scrap of paper that connects this case with one they will never forget. And like the Bone Collector before him, Rhyme and Sachs find themselves pitted against a twisted serial killer choosing his victims seemingly at random, a perpetrator who plans his work to the last detail, in a deadly contest with any who try to stop him. But how close is his connection with that old case? What is the meaning of the words tattooed in poison on the skin of his first victim? And where will he strike next?

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TELEVISION EVENT FROM NBC, STARRING RUSSELL HORNSBY, ARIELLE KEBBEL, AND MICHAEL IMPERIOLI. From New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver—Lincoln Rhyme is back, and on the trail of a killer whose weapon of choice cripples New York City with fear. The weapon is invisible and omnipresent. Without it, modern society grinds to a halt. It is electricity. The killer harnesses and steers huge arc flashes with voltage so high and heat so searing that steel melts and his victims are set afire. When the first explosion occurs in broad daylight, reducing a city bus to a pile of molten metal, officials fear terrorism. Rhyme, a world-class forensic criminologist known for his successful apprehension of the most devious criminals, is immediately tapped for the investigation. Long a quadriplegic, he assembles NYPD detective Amelia Sachs and officer Ron Pulaski as his eyes, ears and legs on crime sites, and FBI agent Fred Dellray as his undercover man on the street. As the attacks continue across the city at a sickening pace, and terrifying demand letters begin appearing, the team works desperately against time and with maddeningly little forensic evidence to try to find the killer. Or is it killers…? Meanwhile, Rhyme is consulting on another high-profile investigation in Mexico with a most coveted quarry in his crosshairs: the hired killer known as the Watchmaker, one of the few criminals to have eluded Rhyme’s net. Juggling two massive investigations against a cruel ticking clock takes a toll on Rhyme’s health. Soon Rhyme is fighting on yet another front—and his determination to work despite his physical limitations threatens to drive away his closest allies when he needs them most…

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs return to New York City to investigate a triple murder and confront a killer terrorizing couples at their happiest--and most vulnerable in this explosive New York Times bestseller. In the early hours of a quiet, weekend morning in Manhattan's Diamond District, a brutal triple murder shocks the city. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs quickly take the case. Curiously, the killer has left behind a half-million dollars' worth of gems at the murder scene, a jewelry store on 47th street. As more crimes follow, it becomes clear that the killer's target is not gems, but engaged couples themselves. The Promisor vows to take the lives of men and women during their most precious moments--midway through the purchase of an engagement ring, after a meeting with a wedding planner, trying on the perfect gown for a day that will never come. The Promisor arrives silently, armed with knife or gun, and a time of bliss is transformed, in an instant, to one of horror. Soon the Promiser makes a dangerous mistake: leaving behind an innocent witness, Vimal Lahori, a talented young diamond cutter, who can help Rhyme and Sachs blow the lid off the case. They must track down Vimal before the killer can correct his fatal error. Then disaster strikes, threatening to tear apart the very fabric of the city--and providing the perfect cover for the killer to slip through the cracks.

The "master of ticking-bomb suspense" (People) Jeffery Deaver delivers the latest thriller featuring his beloved protagonists Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs as they search for a criminal whose fascination with breaking locks terrorizes New York City. A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment’s supposedly impregnable door lock and rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the sociopathic intruder, who calls himself "the Locksmith,” can break through any lock or security system ever devised. With more victims on the horizon, Rhyme, Sachs and their stable of associates must follow the evidence to the man’s lair… and discover his true mission. Their hunt is interrupted when an internal investigation in the police force uncovers what seems to be a crucial mistake in one of Rhyme's previous cases. He’s fired as a consultant for the NYPD and must risk jail if he investigates the Locksmith case in secret. The Midnight Lock is a roller-coaster read that takes place over just a few days’ time, features surprise after surprise and offers a fascinating look at the esoteric world of lockpicking.

The gripping new thriller from the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller Jeffery Deaver

A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife—that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.