The Twelfth Card: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel (6)

Excellent but readers expect nothing less from this author.

Sixteen-year-old Geneva is doing research for a school project. The subject is one of her ancestors, Charles Singleton. She hears a noise in the hall and takes precautions. Suddenly a man enters the room and attempts to kill her. But she has outsmarted him and she runs for her life.

Someone has hired a hitmen to kill Geneva. !Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs need to find out why and who is behind it.

2

I love the Lincoln Rhyme mysteries because they have fact blended with the fiction. This story is full of twists and turns. I thought I knew where the story was going and BAM on a totally different path. This what I like in a mystery-it doesn't have to be true to life. I read as an escape and the twelfth card was a great escape. Grab a snack and a cup of your favorite beverage and enjoy the next few hours in this book.

"The Twelfth Card" begins in an Afro-American museum-library. A skinny lass scrolls through a microfiche, absorbed in research for a high school term paper. Hidden in the bookshelves, a stalker creeps forward with dark intentions....

The Lincoln Rhyme novels resemble a Sherlock Holmes story, or an episode of the TV series "CSI." The killer eventually succumbs to rigorous examination of clues left behind.

Jeffrey Deaver's main characters stand out for two reasons: One is that the hero is paralyzed in all four limbs, a quadriplegic. The other is his female sidekick. In her cherry-red Camaro, Amelia Sachs races at incredible velocities to save the day, sharpshooting with her finger-sensitive automatic pistol; or in her white hazard suit, she walks the crime-scene grid and collects evidence. Audio-visual gimmicks allow Lincoln Rhyme to accompany her at the grid. He collates the data in a wheelchair, connected to his computerized laboratory. And of course Rhyme makes brilliant deductions.

Though this was my sixth reading of a Lincoln Rhyme suspense-mystery, Deaver still managed to create moments of genuine suspense as well as mystery. I did not, however, read the six books in succession. I advise against that. Deaver uses a formatted recipe, and if you read the stories in succession you will be saying, "This is just the same old thing." Allow a few months, if not a full year, between readings; read other authors; and understand that the goodness of these stories lies not in the sameness of their overall pattern, but in the variety of their details. Deaver tries to set his events in colorful locales, and he always gives salient qualities and personalities to his characters. He also provides historical, political, and scientific background. Details, details, details.

If you are pleased by interesting characters, by fairly plausible action sequences, by prose that reads easily and progresses at a fairly fast pace, or by a story with multiple twists, this novel has something to offer. Just remember to intersperse your Lincoln Rhyme adventures with books by other authors.

I can't write a review without pointing out that the premise of why Geneva Suttle needed to not only be killed, but hunted by 2 professional killers who were offered a quarter million to do so was pretty weak and a little unbelievable. I would think that throwing away the article probably would have been sufficient to achieve the same goal or just count on a teenager losing interest or not being able to put 2 and 2 together. Plus, the person who master minded the whole thing really didn't seem to have much of a motive for needing her dead. He stood to lose a job, that's it. But having said that, I thought the book was really a good read. The characters are well developed, the writing provides a lot of surprises throughout the book. With the premise being as weak as it was, my review speaks volumes for how much I enjoyed reading it. I will be reading all the books in the series for sure.

Somebody is trying to kill Geneva, a black schoolgirl. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are trying to protect her and find out why she is in danger. As usual in these stories, nothing is what it seems and it's only in the last pages that the truth is discovered. Geneva researches, with the help of Amelia, events that happened to one of her ancestors 140 years ago. The plot is thin and I found myself not caring one iota what happened to this ancestor and nor, for that matter, to Geneva herself. And why would a civilian forensic crime expert be allowed by the NYPD to lead an operation to protect a possible assassination victim? Come on, Mr. Deaver, this is laughably unrealistic. I do love the Lincoln Rhyme series, but this has to be the weakest one so far; not even close to The Bone Collector, The Skin Collector or the Vanished Man. 2 and a half stars, really.

Jeffery Deaver says proudly to his friend, “I know all about those blacks because I watch lots of TV. I mean, I can talk “black!” Listen to this: “I got it down, babee, can you dig it?”

What, you say my black girl characters sound like 70s onscreen pimps written by middle-aged white men? Okay, well, even if I didn’t get all the black-talk right, one of my main characters is a smart black girl (and you know how rare that is).

Blacks should be grateful that I’ve written my voice onto a black character so perfectly. Here’s an example of this perfection: a black kid says to a black girl being teased at her ghetto school by almost the entire trash-black student body, “They don’t like it when you take school seriously you know.”

Then the narrator says this black girl wasn’t hurt by insults from her classmates that said good grades meant she was “aspiring to be white,” because, “to some extent, it was true.”

Deaver responds to criticism: Why are you so mad? All white people are at the top of the bell curve so it just makes sense that a smart black girl would work toward being white. With determination maybe she can eventually erase herself completely and become not-black, like East Asians!

If you enjoy a little racism on the side of a good plot, this book is for you.

OPEN LETTER TO JEFFERY DEAVER (Because his website contact link is not working.)

Mr. Deaver,

The Twelfths Card’s plot is interesting and I appreciate that it includes some excellent pieces of black history. But did you find that history on network TV or read about Harlem and Langston Hughes in your high school US history text? Probably not. You most likely consulted black academics, experts in black history, and other reliable sources.

However, though you know the portrayal of blacks in US history is lacking and you searched for real black history, you somehow felt you knew black people well enough to give them voice.

I’m fact, you do know black people well enough to give us voice because we are human and, generally, all of humanity is the same. If you had simply written the black characters as humans, you would have been fine. But I guess to you a Black character is only authentic if its humanity is diminished by old tropes and racial stereotypes.

To make matters worse, you even went so far as to have them talk about race FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE.

This, Mr. Deaver, is textbook racism perpetrated by a well-meaning white person whose biases tricked him into believing they didn’t exist. Your kind of hubris causes great harm to all Americans.

You obviously have not spent time intimately connecting on race with even one black person. Nor did you bother to read academic texts on race written by reliable black scholars. What inspired such a lack of humility?

If your intention was to create authentic black voices, and I believe it was because of the black history you’ve included, then you have failed. MONUMENTALLY.

If you care about your black readership and you don’t include black characters as a tool for political expression or to feign inclusivity for your white readers, DO BETTER. (For how, see previous paragraphs.)