"The Broken Window" by Jeffrey Deaver (audio)

In my list of crime novel series, I had forgotten the Lincoln Rhyme books. I guess this series has never made a huge impact on me, and is probably why I forgot to include it in my list. I'm not sure why this is...the stories aren't all that bad. Should I blame it on the movie "The Bone Collector" that cast Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie as Rhyme and his love interest Amelia Sachs (to this day I think the casting director was smoking something)? Maybe. I do have these hangups between books and movies. That being said, this book was well-reviewed and I uploaded it to my iPod for my vacation.

In the Lincoln Rhyme novels, you almost always learn something. In this one, the premise is built around data-mining, and what happens when the miner in question is a psychopath. The bad guy has access to the files of a large data mining company, and uses the information to learn everything about his victims...their hobbies, daily routines, favorite foods, clothing size, their sex life...to gain their trust then knock them off. At the same time, he uses data and its manipulation to pin the crime on someone else. He just happens to pin one of his crimes on Rhymes' cousin, which unleashes the wrath of curmudgeon-ish criminalist quadriplegic.

Now, I don't know how much of the "facts" of data mining in this novel are true, but I have to be honest that the possibilities are terrifying. I can completely buy the idea that everything we do is tracked somehow and sits in some company's archives. We live under the watch of Big Brother because of our toll transponders, our credit cards, our internet activity, our preferred shopper cards to Borders, Mobil, GolfSmith, etc. This novel takes it to the nightmare level. Despite any hangups I may have, I was highly intrigued with this story simply because of the subject matter, and would recommend it.