Jeffery Deaver - The Empty Chair

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Jeffery Deaver - The Empty Chair» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Триллер, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Empty Chair: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Empty Chair»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

The Barnes Noble Review
May 2000
The Empty Chair is the third – or, if you count a guest appearance in the millennial thriller The Devil's Teardrop, the fourth – novel to feature Lincoln Rhyme, the irascible forensic genius who became a quadriplegic when a cave-in at a crime scene damaged his spinal cord beyond repair. The series began in 1997 with The Bone Collector, which was recently made into a so-so film starring Denzel Washington. Every Rhyme novel to date has been characterized by authentic forensic detail and wild, even extravagant plotting, and the latest entry is no exception. The Empty Chair may, in fact, be the single trickiest suspense novel published so far this year.
Unlike earlier volumes, The Empty Chair takes place outside of New York City in the bucolic but sinister environs of Paquenoke County, North Carolina. Rhyme – accompanied by his long-suffering physical therapist, Thom, and his beloved forensic assistant, Amelia Sachs – has just been accepted as a patient at the Medical Center of the University of North Carolina, where he is scheduled to undergo an experimental procedure that might increase the range of his mobility but might, on the other hand, result in his death. Shortly after his arrival, Lincoln 's plans are disrupted by an unforeseen emergency. Jim Bell, Paquenoke County sheriff, has trouble on his hands and needs Lincoln 's expertise.
According to Bell, a disturbed teenager – known, for reasons that become graphically clear, as the Insect Boy – has murdered a local football hero and abductedtwoyoung women. Convinced that the women have only hours to live, Bell asks Lincoln to examine the trace evidence found at the abduction site in the faint hope of pinpointing the kidnapper's location. Though he knows nothing about the physical composition of the surrounding area – he and Sachs, as he repeatedly comments, are "fish out of water" in the American South – Rhyme agrees to help. Once again using Amelia Sachs as his eyes and legs, he sets up an ad hoc forensic lab in a borrowed corner of the local Sheriff's office and goes to work.
This sort of scenario – a crazed killer, a race against time, a scattered handful of clues – offers more than enough drama to fuel any number of traditional suspense novels. In The Empty Chair, however, this same scenario is merely the first level of a complex, multitiered mystery that constantly confounds our most fundamental expectations. The first indication that The Empty Chair contains unexpected depths comes when Lincoln, flawlessly interpreting his disparate bits of evidence, locates both the Insect Boy (Garrett Hanlon) and his most recent victim (an oncology nurse named Lydia Johannsen) within the first 150 pages. At that point, Deaver throws away the rulebook.
After talking with Garrett Hanlon in the Paquenoke County jail, Amelia develops the instinctive sense that Garrett might, as he continually claims, be a victim, and that another unidentified killer might still be at large. In a moment of intuitive – and reckless – empathy, Amelia abandons her professional principles and escapes with Garrett, determined both to prove the boy's innocence and rescue the remaining victim, a local history student named Mary Beth McConnell. From this point forward, almost nothing that happens in The Empty Chair is even remotely predictable.
It would spoil too many of the carefully constructed surprises to reveal the plot in any more detail. Suffice it to say that the narrative – which seems, at first, a simple but effective chase story – broadens and deepens to become something stranger and infinitely more complex. Throwing a varied assortment of people and elements into the mix – a trio of Deliverance-style rednecks, an emotionally scarred cancer survivor, a revisionist account of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, an apparently deranged deputy sheriff, a pair of incipient rapists, the hidden motivations of a wealthy industrialist, and the tragic history of Tanner's Corner, a "town without children" – Deaver constructs an artful, entertaining melodrama that has much to say about the destructive consequences of uncontrolled greed.
If The Empty Chair has a besetting weakness, it is Deaver's relentless determination to dazzle the reader with his narrative sleight of hand, piling on an endless, constantly escalating series of shocks, surprises, and unexpected twists that might, in a lesser writer's hands, have become just a bit too much. But Deaver, as usual, is a consummate professional, and he holds it all together with the ease and assurance of a natural storyteller. Readers familiar with the earlier adventures of Lincoln Rhyme will be lining up for this one, which seems likely to attract a substantial number of new readers, as well. The Empty Chair is Jeffery Deaver at his best and most devious and is recommended, without reservation, to anyone in search of intelligent, high-adrenaline entertainment.
– Bill Sheehan

The Empty Chair — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Empty Chair», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

"Not there ," the doughy woman had said bitterly, as if she herself were in danger. "That's where the Insect Boy kills people. He'll find you, he'll hurt you."

"Mother," she'd snapped back, "you're like those assholes at school who tease him."

"You said that word again. I asked you not to. The 'A' word."

"Mom, come on – you sound like a hard-shell Baptist sitting on the anxious bench." Meaning the front row in church, where sat those parishioners particularly worried about their own, or – more likely – someone else's, moral standing.

"Even the name is scary," Sue McConnell muttered. "Blackwater."

And Mary Beth explained that there were dozens of Blackwaters in North Carolina. Any river that flowed from marshlands was referred to as a blackwater river because it was darkened by deposits of decaying vegetation. The Paquenoke was fed by the Great Dismal Swamp and surrounding bogs.

But this information didn't relieve her mother one bit.

"Please, don't go, honey." Then the woman fired her own silver-tipped arrow of guilt: "Now that your father's gone, if anything happened to you I wouldn't have anyone… I'd be alone. I wouldn't know what to do. You don't want that, do you?"

But Mary Beth, fired by the adrenaline that had excited explorers and scientists forever, had packed up her brushes and collection jars and bags and gardener's spade and headed off yesterday morning in the wet, yellow heat to continue her archaeological work.

And what had happened? She'd been assaulted and kidnapped by the Insect Boy. Her mother had been right.

Now, sitting in this hot, disgusting cabin, in pain, sick and half-delirious with thirst, she thought about her mother. Having lost her husband to wasting cancer, the woman's life was falling apart. She'd given up her friends, her volunteer work at the hospital, any semblance of routine and normalcy in her life. Mary Beth found herself assuming the role of parent, while her mother slipped into the world of daytime TV and junk food. Pudgy and insensate and needy, she was nothing more than a pathetic child.

But one of the things her father had taught Mary Beth – by his life as well as by his arduous death – was that you do what you're destined for and don't alter your course for anyone. Mary Beth hadn't dropped out of school as her mother had begged and gotten a job close to home. She balanced her mother's need for support with her own – the need to get her grad degree and, when she graduated next year, to find a job doing serious fieldwork in American anthropology. If that happened to be nearby, fine. But if it was conducting Native American digs in Santa Fe, or Eskimo in Alaska, or African-American in Manhattan, then that was where she'd go. She'd always be there for her mother but she had her own life to look forward to.

Except that now when she should be unearthing and collecting more evidence at Blackwater Landing, conferring with her grad adviser and writing proposals, running tests on the relics she'd found, she was trapped in a psychotic teenager's love nest.

A wave of hopelessness coursed through her.

She felt the tears.

But then she stopped them cold.

Stop it!… Be strong. Be your father's daughter, fighting his illness every single minute of the day, never resting. Not your mother's.

Be Virginia Dare, who rallied the Lost Colonists.

Be the White Doe, the queen of all the animals in the forest.

And then, just as she was thinking of an illustration of the majestic deer in a book about North Carolina legends, there was another flash of motion at the edge of the forest. The Missionary came out of the woods, a large backpack over his shoulder.

He was real!

Mary Beth grabbed one of Garrett's jars, which held a dinosaur-like beetle, and slammed it against the window. The jar crashed through the glass and shattered on the iron bars outside.

"Help me!" she screamed in a voice barely audible because of her sand-dry throat. "Help!"

A hundred yards away the man paused. Looked around.

"Please! Help me!" A long wail.

He looked behind him. Then into the woods.

She took a deep breath and tried to call again but her throat seized. She started choking, spit some blood.

And across the field the Missionary kept on walking into the woods. He disappeared from view a moment later.

Mary Beth sat heavily on the musty couch and leaned her head hopelessly against the wall. She glanced up suddenly; some motion had caught her eye again. It was nearby – in the cabin. The beetle in the jar – the miniature triceratops – had survived the trauma of losing his home. Mary Beth watched him troop doggedly up a summit of broken glass, open one set of wings, then spread a second set, which fluttered invisibly and lifted him off the windowsill to freedom.

17

"We've caught him," Rhyme said to Jim Bell and his brother-in-law, Deputy Steve Farr. "Amelia and me. That was the bargain. Now we have to get back to Avery."

"Well, Lincoln," Bell began delicately, "it's just that Garrett's not talking. He's not telling us anything about where Mary Beth is."

Ben Kerr stood nearby uncertainly, beside the glowing mountain range on the computer screen connected to the chromatograph. His initial hesitancy had vanished and he now seemed to regret the end of his assignment. Amelia Sachs was in the lab too. Mason Germain wasn't, which was just as well – Rhyme was furious that he'd endangered Sachs' life with the sniping at the mill. Bell had angrily ordered the deputy to stay out of the case for the time being.

"I appreciate that," Rhyme said dismissively, responding to Bell 's implicit request for more help. "But it's not that she's in immediate danger." Lydia had reported that Mary Beth was alive and had told them the general location where she was being held. A concentrated search of the Outer Banks would probably find her within several days. And Rhyme was now ready for the operation. He clung, of all things, to a bizarre good-luck charm – the memory of Henry Davett's gruff argument with him, the man's tempered-steel gaze. The image of the businessman prodded him to return to the hospital, to finish the tests and to go under the knife. He glanced at Ben and was about to instruct him on how to pack up the forensic equipment when Sachs took up Bell 's cause. "We found some evidence at the mill, Rhyme. Lucy did, actually. Good evidence."

Rhyme said sourly, "If it's good evidence then somebody else'll be able to figure out where it leads to."

"Look, Lincoln," Bell began in his reasonable Carolinian accent, "I'm not going to push it but you're the only one 'round here's got experience at major crimes like this. We'd be at sea trying to figure out what that's telling us, for instance." He nodded at the chromatograph. "Or whether this bit of dirt or that footprint means anything."

Head rubbing against the Storm Arrow's pillowy rest, Rhyme glanced at Sachs' imploring face. Sighing, he finally asked, "Garrett's not saying anything? "

"He's talking," Farr said, tugging at one of his flag-like ears. "But he's denying killing Billy and he's saying he got Mary Beth away from Blackwater Landing for her own good. That's it. Won't say a word about where she is."

Sachs said, "In this heat, Rhyme, she could die of thirst."

"Or starve to death," Farr pointed out.

Oh, for God's sake…

"Thom," Rhyme snapped, "call Dr. Weaver. Tell her I'll be here for a little longer. Emphasize 'little.'"

"That's all we're asking, Lincoln," Bell said, relief in his lined face. "An hour or two. We sure appreciate it – we'll make you an honorary resident of Tanner's Corner," the sheriff joked. "We'll give you the key to the town."

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Empty Chair»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Empty Chair» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour
Jeffery Deaver
Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair
Bruce Wagner
Jeffery Deaver - The Steel Kiss
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Sleeping Doll
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver - The Never Game
Jeffery Deaver
Отзывы о книге «The Empty Chair»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Empty Chair» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x