The Twelfth Card (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)
by Jeffery Deaver
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Book Reviews of The Twelfth Card (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)
Book Review: Terrible Audio performance ruins an otherwise decent thriller.
Summary: 2 Stars
Buyer beware of the Publishers Weekly and AudioFile reviews on this webpage. If Dennis Boutsikaris is an "accomplished" actor and narrator, then George W. Bush is an "accomplished" orator and Paris Hilton is an "accomplished" actress. Boutsikaris's performance is not "glib" either, as they claim. His attempts at rendering street language of African-Americans sounds like a black comedian's parody of a clueless white guy trying to sound cool in that way. His normal English narration is also awful. Case in point: throughout the book he mispronounces the word "garrotte" as though it were the word "garret." This came as no surprise to me, I regret to say, as I previously had the misfortune of listening to Boutsikaris narrate another audiobook, The Traitor (see my review), throughout which he mangles French words with a horrific accent and frequent mispronunciation and also attempts to render English spoken with a French accent with all the skill and grace of a bull elephant in a tutu. (Yes, I bought both audiobooks at the same time; had I heard the other performance beforehand, I never would have purchased this one!) That book was already mediocre, so the damage was not as great as it is here, where an otherwise well-crafted thriller, of the sort we've come to expect from Jeffery Deaver, is nearly ruined. Note to Simon & Schuster: If this is the best performer you can find for a project like this, abandon it!
Lest anyone think my criticism is too harsh, I note that as of this writing, Amazon sellers are offering this audiobook on CDs for a mere 20 cents! The marketplace speaks -- caveat emptor. Should you decide to be an emptor anyway for 20 cents, well, it's your money to waste as you see fit, but don't forget the cost of shipping. In my opinion, Simon & Schuster should pay YOU to listen to this audiobook!
Book Review: Deaver went too far into the unknown for him...
Summary: 4 Stars
I was curious as to why so many critics and reviewers gave Deaver such a bac 'grade' whenpreviously his books have won raves. Apparently, in coming up with the vernacular for this book to make it more realistic as being from the streets of New York, Deaver stepped into a world into which he knows too little, and in the process screwed up the language and probably some of the personalities of the people he normally would not come into contact with normally with. It's too bad because this is a a cold historical case, which had the ability to be fascinating (and was within its own right). I wonder if there was some way he couls have made it happen in ont of the btter neighborhoods where black kids hangs ouf, instead of risking straining our credulity to hardl
Rhyme and his cronies are thrown into an ancient history involving something that happened at the end of the civil war. During the period of Reconstruction, when the war was over and the country just didn't know what to do with all these free men, it was still just as dangerous to be black in the norht as it was in the south. Once again there was a g reat fear of economic downturn, and of course the blacks were held to blave for that, Lincoln was murdereded, and it looked like the country was goin to take several steps backwards before moving towards equal rights.
In the midst of all this plunges a 13 year old girl with a mind as acute as Lincoln, and the develmaycare attitutde of Sachs. Sachs and company end up rescueing her a few times from herself while she tried to amake a like and a family for herself.
Decent reant. good summer book!
Karen SAdler
Book Review: Another Great Rhyme Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
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!
Book Review: "Yo, girl, don't be wack."
Summary: 2 Stars
Yeah, the urban slang was painful to read. All of the Harlem characters pepper their talk with mentions of making "benjamins" and being either "phat" or "wack." It was phony at best and disrespectful at worst.
Readers of the series should be able to forgive this oversight, however. But what they shouldn't forgive is that the Lincoln Rhyme series has become distressingly formulaic. What used to be interesting character pathos have now become mandatory "cut and paste" elements, which are often shoehorned awkwardly into the plot:
* Rhyme grumpily owning up to his weakness? Check.
* Sachs driving too fast and scratching her scalp? Check.
* The townhouse becoming vulnerable to the very perp they're after? Check.
* Introduction of a new character (in this book, Geneva Settle) who is a little too specialized in her area of expertise (in this book, she knows pretty much everything about African American history)? Check.
* Two to three twists too many? Check.
* Lone wolf bad guy with poor sense of risk/reward sensibilities? Check.
The last Deaver book I read prior to "The Twelth Card" was "The Blue Nowhere." While that book was a mess in its own special way, I actually enjoyed it more because Deaver played ball with a new set of characters. I think it would be good for him to get away from Lincoln Rhyme for a book or two so he can re-evaluate where the series is headed.
I say this with true love for the series. "The Coffin Dancer" and "The Stone Monkey" (other books in the Lincoln Rhyme series) are two of my favorite mystery novels.
Book Review: Not his best but more than ok
Summary: 3 Stars
Jeffrey Deaver is a talented writer who can write a novel that is fast-paced and is easy to read.
He is not an author who writes books that are aimed at becoming literature (eg Cormac McCarthy, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos etc) but he writes to entertain in a light fashion.
In this book, a teenager is targeted by a would-be killer while she is researching the history of a distant relative from the 1860's. Why was she targeted?
That is the problem that the unlikely team of the quadriplegic Lincoln Rhymes and his girlfriend Detective Amelia Sachs need to find out. It is forensic work that will get you thinking and trying to find where are the red herrings that Deaver is notorious for. The red herrings are good but the problem lies in that we expect the red herrings so when the author reveals them, we aren't massively surprised. My hope is that Deaver surprises us one day and writes a book with no twists.
I found the book to be ok but rather lacking in character development and it just felt like the author had written the novel in haste as the story lacked that special oompth that makes some books great. Some of the dialogue did not ring true to me.
There are some little moments of education in the novel that are interesting but I would not recommend this book if you haven't read Deaver before. Try some of his earlier works.