Bone Collector Book/Movie Review

Tags: film, movie, book, review, jeffery, deaver, denzel washington

T is a huge Jeffery Deaver fan, she has read most of his books and even met him at a book signing last year so I said she could do this review. Well she has promised me tomatoes for dinner tonight, so what could I say.

Bone Collector Review

This is a double review really covering both the excellent series of Lincoln Rhyme books that started with Bone Collector and the movie of the same name that starred Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie.

The Book
I think it takes an incredible brave author to write a murder mystery book with it’s main character as a quadriplegic detective, but not only has Deaver done this but he created one of the most interesting and original detective characters that I have ever read, and I have read a few.

Lincoln Rhyme ex-head of NYPD forensics and one of the countries leading criminologist, severely injured during an investigation leaving him with only the movement of one finger and a brilliant mind encased in a broken body.

The book joins Rhyme as he is planning his “final transition” suicide, this is interrupted as he is pressed back into service after a businessman and is female colleague are kidnapped from the airport in New York. The businessman’s body is found buried next to train tracks, with one finger stripped of flesh and bearing a diamond wedding band pointing up out of the ground. The police officer sent to investigate the initial scene is Amelia Sachs, a patrol officer on her last day before transferring to youth services, Amelia spots a pile of white powder and a tiny piece of paper held down with an old iron bolt on the adjacent train tracks and proceeds to stop all trains running whilst she collects and photographs the scene. A move that makes her less than popular with her boss but that opens up new possibilities for Rhyme and his hastily collected team of specialists who press gang Amelia to become Rhyme’s eyes and ears on the ground and throws her in at the deepest end of Crime Scene Investigation.

The story keeps you gripped as you follow Rhyme and Sachs in the race against time to solve the killer’s clues and rescue the victims, each new victim brings clues to the next victim and their time & manner of death. The book brilliantly ties the clues to the where the victims can be found with New York history and urban myth and combines it with the building tension and relationship between Rhyme & Sachs to make this one of my most re-read murder mystery books.

The momentum of this book has been sustained in the subsequent Rhyme books, if you like books by authors such as James Patterson and Martina Cole then you must read this book.

The film
I love the acting in this film, Denzel Washington is brilliant. I think to play a character of this intensity and depth without being able to move more than one finger is something most actors would just not pull off, but Denzel does it with ease. He took the Rhyme from the pages of the book and made him real and whole, and exactly how I had imagined him in the book. When I watched this for the first time a couple of years ago I had never heard of Angelina Jolie, but she gives such a soulful performance just hinting at the hurt in the characters background that it was easy to tell she was destined to go far.

But enough of my singing its praises, for a great series of murder mystery books with great central characters then I recommend Bone Collector and the other Lincoln Rhyme books. To while away a couple of hours watching a good murder mystery film with an excellent cast then watch the movie.

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