A great read although I found some of the lines which had confused me like the technical aspects of the crime scene. Nevertheless, the book was enjoyable.

I kept visualizing Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie in their respective roles all the time.

Hope this series will become a mystery and thriller for the lifetime. Looking forward to complete reading the whole series this year.

Recommended for all the mystery and thriller lovers, although many of you guys might have read this because it was published 22 years ago !!.

In this first book in the series, Lincoln Rhyme, a quadraplegic due to a work related accident, is approached by his former colleague, Detective Sellitto to assist with the investigation of a serial killer. Before his accident Lincoln was an expert on crime scene investigation. Through a police officer Amelia Sachs (a feisty redhead) Lincoln rediscovers his passion for working a crime scene, while plotting his own suicide to end the tedium of his condition.
Gripping, gory and thoroughly intriguing! I am looking forward to reading more in this series.

Este libro me ha encantado. Lo tiene todo para que te atraparte, lleno de suspenso e intriga. Que ha logrado tenerme enganchada en todo momento.

I saw the movie years ago but I couldn't remember the details, only Denzel Washington

This is an outstanding, (but trigger laden), dark detective crime thriller, from the highly recommended (by my friends), Jeffery Deaver. A quadriplegic, former near genius forensic criminal-ist Lincoln Rhyme is considering suicide; beat cop Amelia Sachs, daughter of a well liked and well known lifelong beat cop is considering jacking in her 'uniform' role and moving to police communications; being at the wrong place at the right time and internal police politics brings these two together to investigate, crime scene by crime scene, a seemingly deranged, but very forensic savvy kidnapper-killer on a spree, a killer so confident/deranged that he leaves clues to his next murder at his crime scenes. The case is a race against time as the rocky partnership of Rhymes and Sachs use detailed forensics, research and data gathering to try and save lives and stop the killing spree!

A truly compelling and thrilling book, with multiple pages of surprisingly interesting forensic search and analysis! What Deaver seems to excel at is making forensics interesting, to an extent using the quadriplegic Rhyme's disabilities to force the forensic investigation to almost 100% people talking and discussing issues aloud and in conversation. There have been probably hundreds of thousands of crime detective books published of which the vastly majority appear to be formulaic, is must have been a blast a fresh air when this series kicked off with it's thunderous debut. The only negative, in my opinion was the need for Amelia Sachs so beautiful, as it added nothing to the book; although Deaver could argue it might have been one of the drivers that got Hollywood to option his work and make a film from it! 8.5 out of 12., up 1.5 points since my last reading of this.

6/2014 ... Read this one again and still a solid 4 stars. I do like the characters in this and look forward to continuing the series.

1st read in 2008 ... Very detailed description of crime scene investigation. I would have given it 5 stars except that it's a bit too gory & gruesome in some places for me. Loved the surprise ending ... totally unexpected to me. Especially love the 2 main characters & plan to read more of this series & his other books. And yes, it's much better than the movie which was pretty good!

I do have quite a few of Mister Deavers books about Lincoln Rhyme aand when I read this book first CSI and their ilk had not yet caught the interest of the general viewing public. It was still a few years away actually.

Lincoln Rhyme's, a quadriplegic forensic criminalist, first outing in which he meets an Amalia Sachs who will be his partner in many ways in the series that would follow this book. Who at the time of release was quite an original with the view at forensic science and its use of it to track down criminals.
In this book Rhyme is chasing a serial killer who actually is quite aware about who is chasing him and when it comes to the end of the story you will be dazzled by Deavers' very successful use of leaving false trails and plot twists.

A very well and clever written book that made Deaver for me a long time a writer whose books were a blind buy. These days my appetite for the series is spoiled by the series CSI & Bones, which is sad but a sign of a vein of interest that was tapped first with the release of this book.

The Movie with Denzel & Jolie was pretty decent too, albeit mostly for the choice of leading characters and somewhat less for the script of the movie which deviates away from the original ending of the book.

I remember reading this book before but I don’t remember some of this being the same. Updated ? Anyway, I enjoy the exploits and thoughts of Lincoln Rhyme and he as a character that Deaver wanted to make into a Sherlock Holmes type. Like Sherlock he catalogued and studied everything about his city. He learned the history, its ppl, its soil, the buildings; everything. And of course he is a temperamental character. The personality quirks, the deep thoughts and often the obsession he has with attaining an assisted death is hard to take. Lincoln feels there is simply nothing left for him since becoming a quad, and though maudlin, and if you ask me completely wrong — it makes him who he is. And this courtesy of the Bone Collector.

But Lincoln has plenty to offer the world. He’s got guts too! He is fierce in his intellect and his abilities.
I have always pictured Lincoln as a dark skinned black American but the book mentions his skin in a few places being pale ivory and I thought it mentioned his eyes and hair being different so that he couldn’t be how I imagined for years now. Well tough! That’s stuck in my head and I have seen bits of the new show and I am happy that the guy that played Hank from Grimm is playing him.
The others keep shifting in my head a bit, except he and Sellitto.
On to the next book... recommended !
In here Amelia isn’t such a “ oh Lincoln Rhyme the Great!” And sasses back at him. There are interesting characters that I am sure will only continue to develop!

4,5
This forensic thriller story was dark and often disgustingly vivid and horrendous but at the same time it was exciting and a real page turner. All the elaborate details of the crime scenes and the whole collecting the physical evidence process never got boring.

The characters were okay. My favourite was Lincoln's caretaker Thom. He and Rhyme have a weirdly respectful and sarcastic friendship?-work?ship? It was understandable why Rhyme was difficult and hard to please but Thom handled him extremely well.

Oh, but how marvellous would it be to have a brain like our criminologist Lincoln has...also, sarcastic curmudgeonly types of characters are always right up my alley!

Some things, especially the motives of the killer were a little bit too far fetched for me but still intriguing, because the main focus here is on the technical parts of the crime investigation and not the psychological parts that spur our culprit so I wasn't too harsh in my rating.

A murderer on the loose in New York City who leaves clues about his next crime. It is up to a criminalist Lincoln Rymes to figure out these clues and try to stop him. Rymes is paralyzed from the neck down. This is a thriller of a book and I enjoyed it very much. I thought the villian was very frightening and the characters in the book had depth. I had no idea who the murderer was and it totally caught me by surprise (which is a good thing when reading this type of book). I think the only reason I did not give this 5 stars is I saw the movie years ago and I had a notion of Denzel and Angelina as the main characters. I like going into a book with a blank slate. This is the first of a series and one which I will continue.

I figured it out. I don't want to read about unrealistically extraordinary people. I want to read about ordinary people doing realistically extraordinary things.

It starts out promising, impressive feats of deduction and lots of cop-like pizzazz, but quickly settles in to being that and little else. It's lots of Lincoln Rhyme ordering people to "Do a scale count and medulla pigmentation comparison" and "Check for cellular compression" and "Get a polarized shot of the cellophane." And that's not even consistent. This brilliant criminalist sends a whole bunch of guys around the city buying veal shanks out of their own pockets to make a comparison, but sets an unusual knot aside for later like it's not important? It doesn't read like the author thought up a clever crime story and set about having his hero solve it. Rather, it reads like the author gathered together every high-hat forensic analytic test and piece of lab equipment known to man and then cobbled together a series of events to include each and every one of them. Being this impressed by all this amazing crap gets tiresome.

I'm going to make a confession now, to something perhaps horrible. This expert crime solver thing reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps this is blasphemous for a lover of detective and mystery novels, but - gasp! - I never liked him all that much. He was so far above everyone and made so many deductions that were impossibly cerebral (and was so damned arrogant about it too) that I couldn't connect with Holmes or the solution of the crime. I didn't participate, didn't try to figure it out myself; I just read about two geniuses, one good and one evil, pitted against each other, with the force of good winning in a way poor little uneducated and stupid me could never hope to identify with.

Same thing here. Pah.

And then there's the unbelievability. Lincoln Rhyme has amassed three or four fancy college degrees, risen to the top of NYPD and solved thousands of cases, created a vast database of technical stuff like types of dirt and paint chips and tires, given himself a complete self-education about the history of all of the botanical, chemical, geological, zoological, engineering, and cultural aspects of New York City, written a couple of books, and spent the last three years learning how be a C-4 CSI patient, all before the age of, what, forty? (I know. I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to buy the entire New York City Police Department kowtowing to one retired criminalist and filling his bedroom with every million-dollar piece of equipment in existence and every staff member he asks for so he can single-handedly solve one kidnapping/murder, but I readily buy griffins and wizards and prophecies of The One. Yes, it is funny.) Pah again.

Lincoln Rhyme seems to be the only character who is at all developed, but I have to wonder how realistic he is, given the idiocy that was JoJo Moyes' Me Before You. The supporting cast of captains and detectives and deputy commanders and whatever are interchangeable. Then we have the oh-so-clichéd saucy-and-obviously-gay personal assistant/nurse (so gay, apparently, that they made him a woman played by Queen Latifah in the movie) and the undiscovered-genius-and-sultry-beauty (a failed model, even! I am so freaking tired of the women in stories always being devastatingly beautiful) obviously-soon-to-be protégé/love interest. Pah the third.

DNF-ing at 36%.

I do like the references to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Not sure what it has to do with the story, and it doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with it, but that's one of my favorite paintings. I just found it online and spent fifteen minutes or so immersed in it yet again, so that was nice.

DISGUSTING, YET RIVETING!

The Bone Collector is a police procedural/thriller about a sick and twisted serial killer and the criminologist who brings him down.

There are over 2,500 reviews and over 150,000 ratings of this book on Goodreads, so mine doesn’t really matter at this point, but I will post one anyway!

This is a complex, intricately plotted sick and twisted tale with intelligent MC’s and a sick and twisted killer. I have read some later books in the series, so it was interesting to read the first book. I was able to gain some insight into how this series and relationships developed, especially the relationship between Sachs and Rhyme. Like some of the later books, the plot is complicated and has many threads. I enjoyed seeing all of the threads come together.

I did not enjoy the level of detail included in the killer’s scenes. This sick individual cut people down to the bone, essentially skinning them alive. There is one scene involving rats feasting on a victim that caused me to put this book down for several days. And the final scene with the killer being taken down was absolutely disgusting!

However, by the time I got to the most brutal of passages, I was hooked which compelled me to pick this book up again but had I not been, I don’t know if I could have done it. I read some sick and twisted books, but this book takes things to another level.

Trigger Warnings: Almost everything imaginable!

I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway!