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Deaver delves into tricks of the magic trade

Sunday, March 23, 2003

By Pohla Smith, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Jeffrey Deaver is one of our major authors in the genres of the thriller and the police procedural because he excels at both plotting and characterization.

	"The Vanished Man" By Jeffrey Deaver Simon & Schuster ($25)

Those skills are especially evident in his series featuring Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic forensics consultant to the New York Police Department, where he once worked, and his lover, police officer, Amelia Sachs. She functions as Dr. Watson to Rhyme's Holmes.

Deaver also is without peer in taking the reader to new worlds in which he has made himself an expert.

Witness what he has taught us: Forensics, quadriplegia and the technology used to ease its impact and the smuggling of Chinese to New York, to name a few.

In Deaver's fifth book in this series, he takes us to the world of magic, a perfect milieu for one of his labyrinthine plots. Quick-change artistry, sleight of hand, misdirection, illusion, escapes -- they're all here in a series of murders that copy famous magic tricks.

It begins with the death of a young music student who was cruelly tied up in a way that strangled her.

Are there more individual murders to come, or are these events leading up to a much larger "show?"

To help them sort out the various clues, Rhyme and Sachs find a consultant of their own, Kara, a professional magician. Still an apprentice, she's immediately of invaluable help on the first murder, identifying the killing itself as a macabre representation of a Houdini escape and the killer's escape as a trick called The Vanished Man.

Kara's help gets more intricate and more valuable as the case moves along, and eventually they identify the murderer as a magician who lost his wife and was badly burned during rehearsal for a dangerous stunt. They decide his target is a popular circus owned by the same man who owned the smaller circus in which the tragedy occurred.

But nothing untoward happens at the circus, and Rhyme and Sachs realize they have been the subjects of a huge misdirection trick.

And so it goes for the rest of the book, until you are even ready to wonder if it's really Rhyme and Sachs at the head of this convoluted but oh-so-entertaining novel.