Author: Jeffery Deaver
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: worthy!
This is a movie/novel review. The movie is reviewed on the 0-J movie page.
So it's after noon on the first of the year. It seems like a decent time to surface and start this year the way I intend to complete it: reviewing stuff! Hopefully good stuff. At least in the majority. And whilst this blog is primarily about writing and reading, it's also about other dynamic visual media such as movies and TV. so I thought I'd start the year with a novel/movie review. The Bone Collector is an older novel, published in 1997, but it's a good one and became a movie in 1999, but the tow have very little in common when you get right down to it.
The biggest problem with this novel is that it's really, really, and I mean really, do I hear a really? Yes! Really hard to generate any tension or drama over the question of whether Lincoln Rhyme will commit suicide when this novel is the first in a long series! It's the starter for Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series, of which there are ten in print, with a new one due to be published 2014. I first saw it as a movie and decided to start this year by reviewing the novel itself, since I've read neither it nor anything else by Deaver.
The story begins with a couple arriving in New York City at the airport, being picked up by a cab, but instead of arriving at Fifth avenue, the sleeping couple awaken to discover they're being driven through a mess of broken-down factories. The cabbie pays no attention to their protests and they cannot open the doors from the inside. The woman tries to break a window using her laptop, but succeeds only in breaking the laptop
Next we're in New York City with foot patrol officer Amelia Sachs (they changed the last name in the movie to make her seem Irish. I have no idea why - maybe they're anti-Semitic?!). In the novel she wants out of patrol work and into public affairs to rest her prematurely arthritic joints. In the movie she wants out to join the youth squad. She gets a call to investigate a report of a body at the railroad tracks under a really old bridge. The "body" is actually a hand rising above the gravel bed, with the flesh of the forefinger missing, and replaced with an engagement ring. Sachs digs down to the face, but the victim is already dead. She takes charge of the crime scene (not buying a camera as she does in the movie, but in closing down a street and stopping a train, for both of which she gets into trouble. In the movie, she gets chewed out just as in the book, and in both cases it seems too forced to be true - like we need to have a really ham-fisted, red-herring of a dumb cop for some reason?
These smart and positive actions on her part bring her to the attention of a morose Lincoln Rhyme, who is a quadriplegic, having been appallingly injured (C4 crush) on the job four years before. We see this in the movie, but don't get a flashback in the novel. Ex detective Rhyme is much more angry and sad in the novel than the movie. Once he comes on board with the investigation, he demands and gets everything he wants in terms of support and equipment to run down this "unsub" as the killer is referred to. It's all set up right there in his bedroom (which is huge). Deaver loves to show off how much research he's done into Forensic criminalistics, which is in equal parts interesting and annoying. He could have done with less and still had a good novel.
One of the biggest changes between novel and movie is the overly large switch of genders of so many characters and victims. Again, no idea why. The team quickly realizes that the body Sachs uncovered was one of a couple who were kidnapped from the airport in a cab, and the woman is still alive - until 3pm (4pm in the movie - why? No idea!). Thus far the genders match in movie and novel, and they meet their ends in the same way. The third vic is a guy in the movie, not a third generation American women of German ancestry, which deaver uses to publish some entirely unnecessary and irritating German conversation/thoughts. The third vic meets her/his end by the same means, but in the movie the guy is tied-up like the second victim, whereas in the novel, the girl is simply badly injured, tied-up but not tied to anything, and left lying in an alley. She survives, the guy does not.
In the end I can confirm that this is a worthy read. Deaver does annoy me in his writing, which is why I don't plan on following this series (I don't see where it can really go effectively, and I didn't find it interesting enough), but he does create a good ending which is very different from the subsequent movie, as indeed is the perp. The novel is better than the movie, but the movie is worth a watch, if only once!
