Review of Jeffery Deaver's The Kill Room

The Kill Room by Jeffery Deaver

This is the tenth of Jeffery Deaver's fascinating Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs novels. For those unfamiliar with the series, Rhyme is a quadriplegic former policeman, a forensic genius who consults for law enforcement agencies from his high-tech control room in a New York City brownstone. Sachs is his lover, still on the force. Despite her premature osteoarthritis, she functions as his legs and eyes on crime sites, often wearing a streaming video camera so he can view the murder scene.

One morning, Rhyme's friend and former partner Detective Lon Sellitto appears with a Captain (Special Services Division) and Nance Laurel, an Assistant District Attorney. They have an unusual case. Roberto Moreno, a US citizen and passionate anti-US advocate in Latin America, was murdered by a super sniper in a hotel room in the Bahamas. Two other people in the room were also killed, apparently by flying glass. Laurel has evidence that the assassination was ordered by the head of NIOS, a quasi-federal intelligence gathering agency headquartered in New York City. She believes that Shreve Metzger, a man with known anger-management issues, has gone rogue and ordered  the assassination on flimsy intelligence.

Police in the Bahamas seem eager to call it a mob hit and close the case. Offending the US, source of many tourist dollars, is not in their interest. They stonewall so effectively that Rhyme, for the first time since the accident that crippled him, decides to travel to the murder scene himself. While he is away, the criminals' mop-up man, a gourmet cook who loves his knives, is busy eliminating witnesses and any possible links to the perpetrators. It seemed for a while that we were going to have a Hannibal Lecter-type scenario as well, but the author mercifully stopped short of that––barely.

Like most of the Rhyme thrillers, the story is complex and well-plotted, with many twists; but it is not for the faint of heart or stomach. The issues it addresses made me uncomfortable, and I found myself yelling at or arguing with the author and various characters from time to time, much to my husband's amusement. The relationship between Rhyme and Sachs shifts subtly as her arthritis progresses, and Rhyme relearns the sobering lessons of his incapacity afresh in the waters off Nassau. It is Rhyme, with his genius, crotchety character, and authentic-sounding relationships that keeps me coming back book after book to this sometimes gruesome series.

I would like to think of this book as just another thriller, but it pulls in many real situations from recent headlines and raises questions that we as a nation have yet to answer. In addition to his taste for the gruesome and bizarre, Deaver has a rare gift for challenging the world views of his readers, often to their discomfort.

When is it acceptable to assassinate someone who may be plotting a terrorist attack, based on intelligence information? What if they are US citizens? On US soil? What about "collateral damage,'' which is what we call the inadvertent death of nearby innocents? What if the intelligence information is accidentally or deliberately flawed? Who makes these decisions? Who should? And what processes and levels of oversight are in place to prevent abuse of this horrific ability to target and kill anyone, anywhere, at any time? Some of these questions may be unanswerable; situational ethics and the "good of the many" versus the individual right of due process is the thorniest piece of the legacy that 9/11 left with us. And perhaps the most troubling issue of all, highlighted in this book: dare we outsource these decisions ––affecting both our individual constitutional rights and our national security––to corporate contractors?

Note: I received a free review copy of Jeffery Deaver's The Kill Room, published by Grand Central Publishing and scheduled for release on June 4, 2013. Versions of this review may appear on other review sites, under my user names there.

Book Review of Noah Hawley's The Good Father: A Novel

The Good Father: A Novel by Noah Hawley

If you live in the USA and have eyes or ears, it's impossible not to know we're preparing to elect a president. So were the people in Noah Hawley's The Good Father, narrated by Paul Allen, M.D. But the big question is not who will be elected. Jay Seagram, the charismatic Democratic senator from Montana and the presidential front-runner, has just been shot dead during a campaign speech at UCLA. Apparently by Daniel, Paul's 20-year-old son. The question is, how can this be?

Paul was finishing his medical residency in Los Angeles when he met green-eyed Ellen, a young photographer who "had the body of a girl who knows how to get into trouble." She was a flake, a dreamer and not a doer. Before long, the very quality that Paul found attractive had turned maddening. If she hadn't become pregnant, their relationship probably wouldn't have lasted a year. Paul loved their son, Daniel, but by the time Danny was seven, Paul couldn't take it anymore. He and Ellen divorced. Though Paul planned to stay on the West Coast to help raise their son, a lucrative job offer sent him to New York City. There, he became chief of rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and remarried.

Danny shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and New York at holidays and during the summer. At age 15, he came to stay with Paul, his second wife Fran, and their young twin boys. All seemed well, but it wasn't long before Daniel left. He dropped out of his first year of college at Vassar without telling Paul. When the book opens, it's June, less than two years later. Daniel's been drifting around the country, working here and there. Paul hasn't spoken to him since the previous fall. When the Secret Service shows up at Paul's door with the news that Daniel has been arrested for Senator Seagram's assassination, his father can't believe it. His smart, likable and gentle kid? There is no way! Paul, whose specialty has made him a medical detective, the doctor other doctors call when a diagnosis remains elusive, resolves to stay calm and remain objective. He'll see Daniel, review the evidence and get to the bottom of it. As Paul says, "This was the case I'd been training for my entire life." It will be months before Paul knows the whole story.

Daniel isn't talking and the evidence leaves room for doubt of his guilt. It also suggests a conspiracy. Paul, a meticulous researcher, collects stacks of research on the places and people Daniel visited during the time he was on the road. As case studies, Paul reads about other political assassinations and mass murders. Proving Daniel's innocence becomes an obsession and an addiction. It's rare that Paul, the skilled diagnostician, can't find the answers. Meanwhile, his wife reminds him that she and his other sons need him too.

This is a harrowing and moving tale, not only of an alienated young man's quest to find himself and to understand where he fits into society, but of an older man's attempt to make sense of his own life that has been suddenly turned upside down. A once-respected physician is now a pariah, the father of the kid charged with killing the hope of an entire country. How did Daniel slip away from Paul and grow into a stranger? What could Paul have done differently? Other children of divorce grow up to be responsible citizens. How much of what a person becomes in life is nature and what is due to nurture? How can a man make peace with the past and sense out of something so senseless?

The Good Father, published by Doubleday, is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of Literary Fiction for Spring 2012. It's an examination of every sort of human relationship, between parents and their children, spouses, lovers, friends and one's self. Gripping and heart wrenching. I strongly recommend it.