The Coffin Dancer

SUMMARY: Detective Lincoln Rhymes, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is put on the trail of the Coffin Dancer, a cunning professional killer who has continually alluded the police. Rhymes - -a quadriplegic since a line-of-duty accident -- must use his wits to track this brilliant killer who's been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. Rhyme works with his eyes and ears, New York cop Amelia Sachs, to gather information from trace evidence at the crime scene (for a start, scrapings from the tires of the emergency vehicles that responded to the Chicago crash) to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off. In the resulting game of cat-and- mouse, both Rhyme and the Dancer are constantly subject to unbelievably timely hunches and brain waves that keep their deadly shuttlecock in play down to the wire. Fair warning to newcomers: Author Deaver is just as cunning and deceptive as his killer; don't assume he's run out of tricks until you've run out of pages. By the author of "The Bone Collector."