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A very tall, very skinny geek is hacking into things with smart controls to make them misbehave: an escalator, a microwave and in-car computers. Cue lots of gory crash-bang-wallops. Detective Amelia Sachs is determined to stop the self-styled “people’s guardian” but her mother’s forthcoming heart op — and the return of a former lover jailed for robbery — prove distracting.
Lincoln Rhyme, her tetraplegic partner, has resigned from the NYPD to teach forensics and is busy learning about the legal intricacies of product liability. Even Ron “Rookie” Pulaski is pursuing an agenda and spending his own money trying to trace a drug dealer.
It takes 350 pages to get the old gang together and another 50 before Jeffery Deaver creates the tense and twisty atmosphere that has seen him sell over 20 million copies. The Steel Kiss is a near miss that traps you behind a school desk instead of strapping you into a rollercoaster.
It doesn’t help that Rhyme has degenerated into an irascible pedant who would certainly disapprove of his creator’s verbless or subjectless sentences. The “mind game of tricking evidence to life” is fascinating but, alas, there’s something wrong with a thriller in which the locations are more exciting than the cast.
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