From the New York Times best-selling author of the Lincoln Rhyme series, a short story about Lincoln Rhyme solving a mysterious plane crash with no forensic evidence. A small jet with only one pilot onboard crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. Local authorities are unsure whether the cause of the crash is a bomb or a violent storm. The case seems like it will be an easy one to solve for former NYPD Homicide Detective Lincoln Rhyme to solve. The evidence is inside the cockpit but there is one problem. The wreckage sits at the bottom of the Puerto Rican Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean that stretches to twenty-eight thousand feet. The plane can't be raised. And there's no way to get to where the evidence lies. "Where the Evidence Lies" by Jeffery Deaver is one of 20 short stories within Mulholland Books's Strand Originals series, featuring thrilling stories by the biggest names in mystery from the Strand Magazine archives. View the full series list at mulhollandbooks.com and read them all! **

DANGEROUSLY GOOD. DISTINCTIVELY DEAVER.Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs return to New York City to confront a killer terrorizing couples at their happiest-and most vulnerable.In the early hours of a quiet, weekend morning in Manhattan's Diamond District, a brutal triple murder shocks the city. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs quickly take the case. Curiously, the killer has left behind a half-million dollars' worth of gems at the murder scene, a jewelry store on 47th street. As more crimes follow, it becomes clear that the killer's target is not gems, but engaged couples themselves.The Promisor vows to take the lives of men and women during their most precious moments-midway through the purchase of an engagement ring, after a meeting with a wedding planner, trying on the perfect gown for a day that will never come. The Promisor arrives silently, armed with knife or gun, and a time of bliss is transformed, in an instant, to one of...

Fiendish suspense. Shocking twists. Twelve diabolical tales. New York Times bestselling author and highly acclaimed storyteller Jeffery Deaver-the undisputed "grand master of the plot twist" (Booklist)-returns with a dazzling new collection of short stories. In these twelve electrifying tales (including six written just for this anthology) Deaver proves once again his genius for the unexpected-in his world, appearances are always deceiving. A devoted housekeeper embarks on a quest to find the truth behind her employer's murder. A washed-up Hollywood actor gets one last, high-stakes chance to revive his career. A man makes an impulsive visit to his hometown, and learns more about his past than he bargained for. Two Olympic track hopefuls receive terrorist threats. And Deaver's beloved series characters Lincoln Rhyme, Kathryn Dance, and John Pellam return in stories now in print for the first time. **

The latest Kathryn Dance thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sleeping Doll!The Monterey Peninsula is rocked when a killer begins to leave roadside crosses beside local highways -- not in memoriam, but as announcements of his intention to kill. And to kill in particularly horrific and efficient ways: using the personal details about the victims that they've carelessly posted in blogs and on social networking websites.The case lands on the desk of Kathryn Dance, the California Bureau of Investigations foremost body language expert. She and Deputy Michael O'Neil follow the leads to Travis Brigham, a troubled teenager whose role in a fatal car accident has inspired vicious attacks against him on a popular blog, The Chilton Report. As the investigation progresses, Travis vanishes. Using techniques he learned as a brilliant participant in multiplayer online role-playing games, he easily eludes his pursuers and continues to track his victims. Among the obstacles Kathryn must hurdle are politicians from Sacramento, paranoid parents and the blogger himself, James Chilton, whose belief in the importance of blogging and the new media threatens to derail the case and potentially Dance's career. It is this threat that causes Dance to take desperate and risky measures...In signature Jeffery Deaver style, Roadside Crosses is filled with dozens of plot twists, cliff-hangers and heartrending personal subplots. It is also a searing look at the accountability of blogging and life in the online world. Roadside Crosses is the third in Deaver's bestselling High-Tech Thriller Trilogy, along with The Blue Nowhere and The Broken Window.Unabridged Compact Disk Includes a Bonus MP3 Cd of Jeffery Deaver's The Blue Nowhere!From Publishers WeeklyIn bestseller Deaver's surprise-filled third Kathryn Dance novel (after The Sleeping Doll), Dance, an agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, gets an eye-opening education in some of the hottest areas of the cyberworld. After an auto accident kills two teens, vicious smears of Travis Brigham, the teen driver deemed responsible but not charged in the accident, appear on the Chilton Report, a popular blog. After one of the accusing bloggers barely survives an assault, Brigham becomes a person of interest. Brigham disappears, and attacks, each preceded by a crude roadside cross, spread to other Chilton bloggers. Meanwhile, Dance also looks into a mercy killing at Monterey Bay Hospital that takes an unexpected turn, and Robert Harper, a special prosecutor from the attorney general's office in Sacramento, begins an investigation that will affect her. Deaver's expert and devious plotting makes it a challenge to stay only a couple of steps behind him. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistDeaver is bound to slip up sometime. But not this time. This novel, which follows on the heels of Sleeping Doll (2007), again stars California Bureau of Investigation agent Kathryn Dance and, like its predecessor, is tightly constructed with a suspenseful story and plenty of plot twists. Deaver, perhaps more than any other crime writer, is able to fool even the most experienced readers with his right-angle turns, and this story of a serial killer who uses social networks to find his prey is full of them. Deaver’s investigators are very good at their jobs, and in order to fool them (and us), he must be exceedingly clever, as well as just a little bit deceitful (having characters say things that turn out not to be true, for example, even though they believed the things when they said them). So far Deaver has avoided accidentally telegraphing a plot twist in advance, but someday, surely, he’ll out-clever himself. Or maybe he won’t. This is an excellent entry in what promises to be a series as popular as the author’s Lincoln Rhyme novels. --David Pitt

It was a “million-dollar bullet,” a sniper shot delivered from over a mile away. Its victim was no ordinary mark: he was a United States citizen, targeted by the United States government, and assassinated in the Bahamas. The nation's most renowned investigator and forensics expert, Lincoln Rhyme, is drafted to investigate. While his partner, Amelia Sachs, traces the victim's steps in Manhattan, Rhyme leaves the city to pursue the sniper himself. As details of the case start to emerge, the pair discovers that not all is what it seems. When a deadly, knife-wielding assassin begins systematically eliminating all evidence-including the witnesses-Lincoln's investigation turns into a chilling battle of wits against a cold-blooded killer.

In the most ingenious and provocative thriller yet from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver, a conscience-plagued mobster turned government hitman struggles to find his moral compass amid rampant treachery and betrayal in 1936 Berlin.Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: prison or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He's to hunt down and kill Reinhard Ernst -- the ruthless architect of Hitler's clandestine rearmament. If successful, Paul will be pardoned and given the financial means to go legit; if he refuses the job, his fate will be Sing Sing and the electric chair. Paul travels to Germany, takes a room in a boardinghouse near the Tiergarten -- the huge park in central Berlin but also, literally, the "Garden of Beasts" -- and begins his hunt. In classic Deaver fashion, the next forty-eight hours are a feverish cat-and-mouse chase, as Paul stalks Ernst through Berlin while a dogged Berlin police officer and the entire Third Reich apparatus search frantically for the American. Garden of Beasts is packed with fascinating period detail and features a cast of perfectly realized locals, Olympic athletes and senior Nazi officials -- some real, some fictional. With hairpin plot twists, the reigning "master of ticking-bomb suspense" (People) plumbs the nerve-jangling paranoia of prewar Berlin and steers the story to a breathtaking and wholly unpredictable ending.Amazon.com ReviewJeffery Deaver's Garden of Beasts introduces anti-hero Paul Schumann, a notorious rubout man for the New York Mafia known for his cold and professional approach to his job. But the jig is up when he is duped by high-ranking feds who give him a choice--prison or one more impossible job: assassinate the man who's running Hitler's plan for rearming Germany. The hard-nosed German-American lands on the streets of Berlin where immediately the best-laid plans of the United States Government go awry. Schumman finds himself in a city living in fear, tracked by Berlin's best homicide detective. As the intricate chase wears on, both men will discover that the greatest evil is the ascendant Nazi party. Deaver's novel, equal parts noir thriller and historical extrapolation, is a page-turner that offers a twisting visceral experience of the tension in Berlin during that fateful summer. He draws sympathetic portraits of everyday Germans caught between duty to country and their consciences. Into this mix, Deaver drops his coldly dangerous hitman who brawls with brownshirts, chums with Olympic athletes, collaborates with criminals, fraternizes with poets, and discovers the hero inside his hardened soul. --Jeremy PughAmazon.com InterviewWhen starting a new book by author Jeffery Deaver, expect to have the wool pulled over your eyes. His plots twist and turn and juke and jive like no others, never ending as expected and always including a jaw-dropping plot development. His latest effort, Garden of Beasts, is no exception. Amazon.com caught up with Deaver to discuss plotting, characters, and the perils of soap opera acting. From Publishers WeeklyDeaver fans expect the unexpected from this prodigiously talented thriller writer, and the creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series and other memorable yarns (The Blue Nowhere, etc.) doesn't disappoint with his 19th novel, this time offering a deliciously twisty tale set in Nazi Berlin. The book's hero is a mob "button man," or hit man, Paul Schumann, who's nabbed in the act in New York City but given an alternative to the electric chair: to go to Berlin undercover as a journalist writing about the upcoming Olympics, in order to assassinate Col. Reinhard Ernst, the chief architect of Hitler's militarization, seen as a threat to American interests. A German spy onboard Paul's transatlantic liner grows suspicious and sends a warning to Germany before Paul discovers and kills him. Then in Berlin, Paul, en route to meet his contact, kills a second suspicious man who may be a storm trooper, setting Insp. Willi Kohl of the Berlin police, or Kripo, on his trail. Deaver weaves the three manhunts—Paul after his target, Kohl after Paul and the Nazi hierarchy after Paul—with a deft hand, bringing to frightening life the Berlin of 1936, a city on the brink of madness. Top Nazis, including Hitler, Himmler and Göring, make colorful cameos, but it's the smart, shaded-gray characterizations of the principals that anchor the exciting plot. An affecting love affair between Paul and his German landlady goes in surprising directions, as do the main plot lines, which move outside Berlin as heroes become villains and vice versa. This is prime Deaver, which means prime entertainment. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

TEMPERS FLARE IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT… …And the wrong move, the wrong word, even the wrong look can set off any man or woman already driven past their boiling point. A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime, edited by bestselling author Jeffery Deaver, features 20 stories of people dealing with not just the torrid weather, but all different kinds of heat. From a retired police chief pitching in on a missing dog report that leads to him solving a murder to a mystery of Southern manners that proves the heat brings out the worst in everybody to a Los Angeles gumshoe who goes to a movie to cool off, but finds a still-warm body inside the theater, these mystery stories all prove that when the temperature rises, anyone can go crazy from the heat, and the most cold-blooded crimes can be committed during the hottest, darkest nights…This volume contains the following award-winning or nominated stories: “Lady on...

His code name is Phate -- a sadistic computer hacker who infiltrates people's computers, invades their lives, and with chilling precision lures them to their deaths. To stop him, the authorities free imprisoned former hacker Wyatt Gillette to aid the investigation. Teamed with old-school homicide detective Frank Bishop, Gillette must combine their disparate talents to catch a brilliant and merciless killer.Amazon.com ReviewIn this 21st century version of the "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," two computer wizards engage in the kind of high-tech combat that only a hacker could love. Wyatt Gillette, a cybergenius who's never used his phenomenal talent for evil, is sitting in a California jail doing time for a few harmless computer capers when he gets a temporary reprieve--a chance to help the Computer Crimes Unit of the state police nail a cracker (a criminally inclined hacker) called Phate who's using his ingenious program, Trapdoor, to lure innocent victims to their death by infiltrating their computers. Gillette and Phate were once the kings of cyberspace--the Blue Nowhere of the title--but Phate has gone way past the mischievous electronic pranks they once pulled and crossed over to the dark side. While Trapdoor can hack its way into any computer, it's Phate's skill at "social engineering" as well as his remarkable coding ability that makes him such a menace to society. As Wyatt explains to the policeman who springs him from prison so that he can find and stop Phate before he kills again, "It means conning somebody, pretending you're someone you're not. Hackers do it to get access to data bases and phone lines and pass codes. The more facts about somebody you can feed back to them, the more they believe you and the more they'll do what you want them to."Bestselling author Jeffery Deaver (The Empty Chair, The Devil's Teardrop) ratchets up the suspense one line of code at a time; his terrific pacing drives the narrative to a thrilling and explosive conclusion. This thriller is bound to induce paranoia in anyone who still believes he can hide his deepest secrets from anyone with the means, motive, and modem to ferret them out. --Jane AdamsFrom Publishers WeeklyHow do you write a truly gripping thriller about people staring into computer screens? Many have tried, none have succeeded until now. Leave it to Deaver, the most clever plotter on the planet, to do it by simply applying the same rules of suspense to onscreen action as to offscreen. Much of the action in this novel about the hunt for an outlaw hacker turned homicidal maniac does takes place in the real world, but much else plays out in cyberspace as a team of California homicide and computer crime cops chase the infamous "wizard" hacker known as Phate. The odds run against the cops. With his skills, Phate can not only change identities at will (a knack known as "social engineering" in hacking parlance) but can manipulate all computerized records about himself. The cops have a wizard of their own, however: a former online companion of Phate's, a hacker doing time for having allegedly cracked the Department of Defense's encryption program. He's Wyatt Gillette, coveting Pop-Tarts (the hacker's meal of choice) and computers, but also the wife he lost when he went to prison and it's his tortured personality that gives this novel its heart as Wyatt is sprung from prison, but only for as long as it takes to track down Phate. The mad hacker, meanwhile, no longer able to discern between the virtual and the real, has adapted a notorious online role-playing game to the world of flesh and blood, with innocent humans as his prey. As he twists suspense and tension to gigahertz levels, Deaver springs an astonishing number of surprises on the reader: Who is Phate's accomplice? What are Wyatt's real motives? Who is the traitor among the cops? His real triumph, though, is to make the hacker world come alive in all its midnight, reality-cracking intensity. This novel is, in hacker lingo, "totally moby" the most exciting, and most vivid, fiction yet about the neverland hackers call "the blue nowhere." Agent, Sterling Lord Literistic. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver has famously thrilled and chilled fans with tales of masterful villains and the brilliant minds who bring them to justice. Now the author of the Lincoln Rhyme series ( The Cold Moon and The Bone Collector , among others) has compiled a second volume of his award-winning, spine-tingling short stories of suspense. While best known for his twenty-four novels, Jeffery Deaver is also a short story master — he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story, and he won the Short Story Dagger from the Crime Writers Association for a piece that appeared in his first short story collection, Twisted . The New York Times said of that book: “A mystery hit for those who like their intrigue short and sweet… [The stories] feature tight, bare-bones plotting and the sneaky tricks that Mr. Deaver’s title promises.” The sneaky tricks are here in spades, and Deaver even gives his fans a new Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs story. Deaver is back with sixteen stories in the tradition of O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. His subjects range from a Westchester commuter to a brilliant Victorian England caper. With these intricately plotted, bone-chilling stories, Jeffery Deaver is at the top of his crime-writing game. This collection includes sixteen stories. The titles of the stories are: Chapter and Verse The Commuter The Westphalian Ring Surveillance Born Bad Interrogation Afraid Double Jeopardy Tunnel Girl Locard’s Principle A Dish Served Cold Copycat The Voyeur The Poker Lesson Ninety-Eight Point Six A Nice Place to Visit

While scouting out film locations for a "Bonnie and Clyde" style film, former Hollywood insider John Pellam finds himself neck-deep in a plot more lurid than any film. Original.Amazon.com ReviewJohn Pellam, scouting locations for a new film in a small town in Missouri, inadvertently witnesses a double homicide and some serious gunplay that left a cop paralyzed. He didn't see the guy who ordered the killings, but the police don't believe him. The U.S. attorney who thinks he knows who was behind the murders has bet his career on Pellam's identification of a criminal the feds have been trying to nail for years. They'll do anything to get Pellam's cooperation, including threatening his new girlfriend, shutting down the movie, and keeping Pellam from inking a deal to get his own film made. That project is Pellam's ticket back to the top of the heap in Hollywood, a perch he fell off of when he supplied the drugs that killed his best friend. The cops want Pellam's testimony, the mob boss wants him permanently silenced, and the film's director wants him to finish the job he's been paid to do. But first Pellam has to find his way out of the traps they've all set for him, and he does it with style, wit, and a self-deprecating charm that makes him a hero to everyone--well, almost everyone.William Jefferies, who usually writes under the better-known nom de plume of Jeffery Deaver, has a couple of other Location Scout mysteries to his name (Shallow Graves, Hell's Kitchen). Pocket Books has reissued them as Deaver titles ("writing as William Jefferies"), but regardless of their provenance, they feature topnotch writing, snappy dialogue, solid pacing, and excellent characterization. Bloody River Blues was overlooked by Deaver's fans when it first came out eight years ago. Now that the publisher has cleared up the mystery of who actually wrote it, it ought to get the attention it deserves. --Jane AdamsFrom Publishers WeeklyMovie location scout John Pellam is working in Maddox, Mo., when he goes out for a case of beer. This innocuous outing lands him in big trouble when his beer collides with the door of a parked car whose occupants subsequently commit a rubout. Next thing he knows, Pellam finds himself being pursued by the killers, who fear Pellam can identify them; by the local police, because a cop was shot during the rub-out; and by the FBI, who think the murder was related to a racketeering case. Vincent Gaudia, the man who was killed, had turned witness against his boss, Peter Crimmins, who is wanted on RICO charges. The official bag of tricks used by the feds and police against Pellam includes interrogation, threats of prosecution on false charges, disruption of Pellam's life and business and hints that the film he's working on could be shut down. Jefferies ( Shallow Graves ) adds a twist that gives Pellam the last laugh while he makes his point about the baseness of the so-called good guys. Although the book works technically, reading a tale so replete with unpleasantness is still no picnic. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.