The Twelfth Card Simon & Schuster Jeffery Deaver

Lincoln Rhyme, Deaver`s popular paraplegic detective, returns (after The Vanished Man) in a robust thriller that demonstrates Deaver`s unflagging ability to entertain. But even great entertainers have high and lows, and this novel, while steadily absorbing, doesn`t match the author`s best. Geneva Settle, who`s 16 and black, is attacked in a Manhattan library while researching an ancestor, a former slave who harbored a serious secret (not revealed until book`s end). Amelia Sachs, Rhyme`s lover/assistant, and then Rhyme are pulled into the case, which quickly turns bloody. After Geneva are a lethally cool white hit man and a black ex-con but even when they`re identified, their motive remains unclear: why does someone want this feisty, hardworking Harlem schoolgirl dead? To find out, Rhyme primarily relies, as usual, on his and Sachs`s strength, forensic analysis, the book`s tour de force opening sequence consists mostly of a lengthy depiction of their painstaking dissection of evidence left during the initial attack on Geneva, and every few chapters there`s an extensive recap of all evidence collected in the case.