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The Stone Monkey: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel

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Overview

LINCOLN RHYME RETURNS! First introduced in the spine-chilling novel The Bone Collector, Lincoln Rhyme dazzled readers with unparalleled forensic sleuthing -- all done from the confines of a wheelchair. A famed criminologist, paralyzed from the neck down, Rhyme compensates for his physical disability with his brains -- and the arms and legs of his brilliant and beautiful protégée, Amelia Sachs. It is Amelia who "walks the grid" for Rhyme, acting as his eyes and ears for the famously dangerous and difficult cases chronicled in Jeffery Deaver's bestselling novels The Bone Collector, The Coffin Dancer, and The Empty Chair. Now the awe-inspiring duo returns in The Stone Monkey. Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln and Amelia manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City and carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as "the Ghost." But when the Ghost's capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race against time: to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who have escaped from the ship and vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of New York City's Chinatown.

Editorial Reviews

In this fast-paced, well-narrated thriller, Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminologist first introduced in The Bone Collector, and his protegee, Amelia Sachs, are recruited by the FBI and the INS to track down a notorious human smuggler nicknamed "The Ghost." After being approached by a Coast Guard vessel, Ghost blows up his own ship, along with its cargo of two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, in order to avoid capture. When two lucky families manage to escape the explosion and make it to New York City, Ghost sets out to kill the survivors before the authorities can locate them among the millions of Chinese immigrants. More than an engaging police procedural, this also offers an interesting glimpse into contemporary Chinese American culture. Veteran narrator William Dufris shines as all of Deaver's characters, but his portrayal of the wacky Chinese mainland detective recruited to help Lincoln is especially enjoyable. Recommended for all popular collections.-Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jeffery Deaver

Jeffrey Deaver was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his journalism degree from the University of Missouri and his law degree from Fordham University. Before attending law school, Deaver worked as a business writer, writing poetry in his spare time, as well as songs, which he traveled around the country and performed. After law school, Deaver got a job with a Wall Street law firm practicing corporate law. He later quit practicing law, in 1990 to write full time. His first novel was entitled "Voodoo," a horror story, his first and only book of that kind. Deaver went on to write suspense novels, including "A Maiden's Grave," which was made into a film by HBO called "Dead Silence." His novel "The Bone Collector" was made into a feature film by Universal Pictures featuring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He writes short stories for Ellery Queen Readers and Alfred Hitchcock magazines. Deaver is a 4 time Edgar Award nominee as well as having received the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year twice. He is the author of fifteen novels and has written some of those stories under the pseudonym William Jeffries.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Simon & Schuster

Filesize

1.26 MB

Number of Pages

432

eBook ISBN

9780743227773

Excerpt from: The Stone Monkey by Jeffery Deaver

They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.

To the human smugglers -- the snakeheads -- who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods, they were ju-jia, piglets.

To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.

They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.

Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.

They were his fragile cargo.

And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, Captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.

It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon as camouflage and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children's plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.

Despite the pitching waves, Captain Sen -- a thirty-year veteran of the seas -- walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold. He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who'd lived for two weeks in close proximity.

Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated "buckets" -- human smuggling ships -- and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Sen didn't mistreat them. Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in America, Meiguo in Chinese, which means the "Beautiful Country."