The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver
477 pgs  (Lincoln Rhyme series #10)

In each of the previous books featuring Lincoln Rhyme, Jeffery Deaver pitted the quadriplegic criminalist against ingenious criminals, whom Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs had to call on all their training and resources in order to bring down. In The Kill Room, it's not necessarily a criminal Rhyme is pursuing, it's an operative of an NSA-like agency of the U.S government who killed an American citizen in the Bahamas.

The man killed was Robert Moreno, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy. While in the Bahamas organizing a protest of a large oil company, Moreno was killed by a sniper bullet that went through his hotel window. The operative that killed him was operating under the false information that Moreno was planning a terrorist attack.

When an attorney brings information about the killing to Lincoln and Sachs, they quickly realize that things are not as they appear on the surface. Lincoln, faced with a crime scene thousands of miles away and a foreign police agency reluctant to cooperate and share evidence, must find a way to investigate the killing and determine why the operative was given false information.

The Kill Room was a nice change of pace in the Rhyme series. It didn't follow the pattern all of the other did of having Lincoln confined to his residence while Amelia acted remotely as his eyes, and legs, gathering information to bring back to him to analyze. This time Deaver gets Lincoln out of his townhouse and doing some of his own legwork for a change while investigating the killing.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆