A Review: The Stone Monkey by Jeffery Deaver

Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 12, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743221990
ASIN: B00011SOXI



The Stone Monkey is the fourth book in the Lincoln Rhyme series, the first three being The Bone Collector, The Coffin dancer and The Empty Chair. Rhyme is brilliant forensic scientist who happens to be a quadriplegic. Along with a team of law enforcement personnel and his partner and lover, Amelia Sachs, he is working to apprehend a murderous human smuggler. Amelia has a talent for finding evidence and acts as Rhyme's legs as she "walks the grid" at crime scenes.

When a vicious smuggler known as the Ghost blows up a ship filled with undocumented Chinese immigrants less than a mile from New York harbor, only a handful of survivors--and the Ghost himself--manage to escape the burning vessel. Rhyme and Amelia must stop the Ghost before he murders the two families who made it to shore. The families have gone to ground in the all but impenetrable world of Manhattan's Chinatown, a fact that makes the pair's two allies--Sonny Li, a Chinese cop, and Dr. John Sung-- invaluable partners.

Description (from the author's website)

Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City 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 Chinese community.

Over the next harrowing forty-eight hours, the Ghost brilliantly and ruthlessly hunts for the families, while Rhyme, aided by a quirky policeman from mainland China, struggles to find them before they die, and Amelia Sachs pursues a very different kind of police work — forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may affect her relationship with her partner and lover, Lincoln Rhyme.