Jeffrey Deaver: The Twelfth Card

The Twelfth Card

Jeffrey Deaver

Simon & Schuster, June 2005, $25.00, 395 pp.

ISBN 0743260929

Sixteen years old high school student Geneva Settle is at the Museum of African American Culture early in the morning reading microfilmed copies of Coloreds Weekly Illustrated in the basement. She is interested in researching her ancestor Charles Singleton, a slave who was freed by his master, given a farm, but eventually incarcerated for robbery. Geneva hears a noise and takes off running because she knows it was the click of a gun.

Thompson Boyd, a killer for hire, was going to murder her and he was using a rape kit as camouflage to disguise how the young woman had to die. Police consultant Lincoln Rhyme, a paraplegic and his lover and partner Amelia Sachs are assigned the case. They hire a security firm to watch over her because she is the target of the killer. Thompson Boyd outwits them at every turn but luck keeps Geneva alive until they catch the hitman. However the person who wants Geneva dead still plans to kill her as she can destroy all he worked so hard to possess.

THE TWELFTH CARD is an exciting police procedural that centers on a high school student who has survived on her own for two years and has no idea why someone wants her dead. Jeffrey Deaver's strength as a writer is his ability to create characters, major and secondary, that readers come to care about. Fans will feel for the policeman who loses his nerve; the hero who fears being tested to see if he regained any feeling in his paralyzed body; and the student who doesn't understand why her world is in danger of detonating.

Harriet Klausner