Friday means Friday’s Forgotten books and a treasure map of reading. Today is a repeat of Barry Ergang’s 2015 review of The Burning Wire by Jeffrey Deaver. After you read his review and mosey around here, make sure you head over to Patti Abbott’s blog as well as Aubrey Nye Hamilton’s blog and see what they suggest today.
THE
BURNING WIRE (2010) by Jeffery Deaver
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
Someone or, perhaps, some terrorist organization has
harnessed Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light’s electricity grid as a weapon
with which to imperil New York City’s denizens. The first incident results in
an arc flash which severely burns a number of victims and which kills another
in an especially grisly manner. After that, demands begin to arrive at the
office of Andrea Jessen, Algonquin CEO, requiring her to brown-out or
completely shut down sections of the city’s extensive power grid, otherwise
others will die. Such actions could endanger New York City’s and several
surrounding areas’ entire security systems. Because acceding to the demands is
an impossibility due to both security measures and time factors, the murderous
atrocities continue, the deaths ever greater in number, as law enforcement
tries to identify and stop the individual or group behind them.
Called in to consult with the NYPD, the FBI,
Homeland Security and, ultimately, to take over the prime investigation, are
criminalist/former NYPD captain Lincoln Rhyme and his forensics team: NYPD
detectives Amelia Sachs, Mel Cooper, and Ron Pulaski.
Rhyme, a quadriplegic as the result of an accident
from his days as an active police officer, now works from his Victorian
townhouse, Sachs and Pulaski functioning as his eyes and ears when they are out
in the field examining crime scenes or following leads. Abrupt, uncompromising,
practical, demanding, and tightly focused, the house-bound Rhyme strikes me as
an amalgam of Nero Wolfe, pulp fiction’s Inspector Allhoff, television’s
Ironside and Leroy Jethro Gibbs—regardless of whether the author intended any
of this.
Rhyme is partially teamed with Jeffery Deaver’s
other series character, California police detective Kathryn Dance, in the
pursuit of a murderer known as the Watchmaker, who has been spotted in Mexico.
Dance, in turn, puts Rhyme in touch with Commander Rodolfo Luna, whose team
leads the trackdown of the Watchmaker.
( Hmm…Rhyme and Dance—sounds like a bizarre new fad
or a third-rate vaudeville act. But I digress.)
The only other novel by Jeffery Deaver I’ve read is
A Maiden’s Grave, which was tense and hard to stop reading, as I still recall
after many years, and which I can assuredly recommend. I made it through The
Burning Wire fairly quickly, too, though initially I wasn’t sure I’d get
through it at all. Divided into five sections, the first is overloaded with
forensic investigative technique, terminology and information, and I have to
concede that when it comes to crime fiction, I’m something of a Luddite
regarding the scientific approach to detection. But recognizing that the nature
of The Burning Wire case required such an approach, I stuck with it and, once
into the second section, was rewarded with a fairly taut, fast-paced suspense
novel (albeit still with a lot of forensics)
that delivered several twists and surprises, and even included some
traditional deductive reasoning by Lincoln Rhyme near the end. My biggest
complaint is that the characterization was superficial at best.
Warning to squeamish readers: there are more than a
few instances of raw and raunchy language in this one, so those who find it
offensive will want to steer clear. Those who can handle it and who like
so-called “ticking clock” thrillers will probably find this one appealing. As
for yours truly, there’s a novel in the Rhyme series that involves an
“impossible” disappearance, so it’s highly probable I’ll be visiting this
sleuth sat least one more time, as well as reading more of the author's
standalones.
Barry Ergang ©2015, 2021
Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work
has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is
available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/
where he is available for your editing
needs.
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