Jeffrey Deaver has always been an ingenious thriller writer and this book returns to the sardonic wit of his earliest work as he too engages in endless trickery and confusion of our expectations.

Their habits of logic and science and legwork are of limited use against someone who constantly stretches the limits of the improbable. This is an impressive addition to Deaver's much-praised sequence of novels about Lincoln and Amelia simply because they find themselves up against an equally intelligent killer with radically different ways of thinking. Is the killer who calls himself Malerik just after a sequence of showy violent deaths, or is that what he wants Lincoln to think? It is not just sleight of hand that deceives the eye it is where the eye is tricked into looking.

More important even than the details of technique which Lincoln and his partner Amelia are taught by young illusionist Kara are the conjuror's habits of mind-misdirection piled on deceit piled on false leads. The art of forensics as described by Deaver leaves one little doubt as to trace evidence left behind at a crime scene.When a gifted illusionist turns his hand to violent death, The Vanished Man is only one of a series of classic conjuring tricks that paralysed forensic investigator Lincoln Rhyme finds himself having to understand. As the fatalities rise and the minutes tick down, Rhyme and Sachs must move beyond the smoke and mirrors to prevent a terrifying act of vengeance that could become the greatest vanishing act of all. For the quadriplegic Rhyme, it means relying on his protégée to ferret out a master illusionist they’ve dubbed “the conjurer,” who baits them with gruesome murders that become more diabolical with each fresh crime.

For the ambitious Sachs, solving the case could earn her a promotion. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation. Criminalist Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate. When a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot, they break down the door.

Within minutes, the police have him surrounded. A killer flees the scene of a homicide and locks himself in a classroom. It begins at a prestigious music school in New York City. Lincoln Rhyme’s team became part of the murder investigation into the death of three young people under strange circumstances. The Vanished Man is book Five of the Lincoln Rhyme series by Jeffery Deaver.

The Vanished Man by Jeffery Deaver