Author

Jeffery Deaver

Title

The Twelfth Card

Publisher

Pocket Star, 2006

Description

The Twelfth Card is a two-day cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of uptown Manhattan, as quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his protÉgÉe Amelia Sachs try to outguess a ruthless professional killer who is after Geneva Settle, a high school girl from Harlem…and it’s up to Lincoln and Amelia to figure out why.

The motive may have to do with a term paper that Geneva is writing about her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a former slave who was active in the early civil rights movement, but was arrested for theft and disgraced. What actually happened on that night in 1868 when Charles was arrested? What went on at the mysterious meetings he attended in Gallows Heights, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was a tense mix of wealthy financiers, political crooks, and working-class laborers and thugs? And what was the “secret” that tormented Charles’s every waking hour?