When Robert Moreno from New Jersey, a vociferous critic of the US government, is blown away in the bedroom of a luxury resort in the Bahamas, it appears that Uncle Sam has killed one of his own — illegally.
However, Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, invited to help an Assistant District Attorney build a case against the bonkers director of the National Intelligence and Operations Service, soon discover Moreno was executed due to faulty intel — which quickly leads to the quadriplegic detective being plunged into the Caribbean, while back in New York his red-haired partner becomes the target of a knife-wielding assassin who likes nothing better than slowly flaying his victims.
Writing the James Bond adventure Carte Blanche has clearly affected Jeffery Deaver deeply. Rhyme’s tenth case takes him into the political sphere of global terrorism, where million-dollar bullets and drones play as big a part as painstaking forensics and police procedure. Nevertheless, The Kill Room is full of his trademark twists, breathless suspense and ironic humour. It is a thriller of “bits, scraps, observations [and] 180-degree changes in direction” which never cheats the reader, so that the only response can be sighs of satisfaction and admiration.
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