The Bro­ken Win­dow pits Lin­coln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs against a mys­te­ri­ous and devi­ous crim­i­nal whose M.O. is to care­fully frame inno­cent peo­ple for his thefts and mur­ders. His frame jobs are so per­fect that he has gone com­pletely unde­tected for years. His exis­tence only comes to light when Rhyme real­izes that the evi­dence in a mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion is too per­fect. Soon, the police find a num­ber of past cases that bear the same signs, in which inno­cent peo­ple may very well have been convicted.

With very lit­tle to go on, Rhyme et. al. set about learn­ing more about their quarry. But, he always seems to be a cou­ple of steps ahead of them; the closer they get, the more he seems to know about them and their plans. It quickly becomes appar­ent that this crim­i­nal can some­how find out any­thing about any­one — and in his hands, knowl­edge is cer­tainly power.

As is his wont, Deaver packs plenty of twists and red her­rings into his tale. In his last Rhyme/Sachs novel, The Cold Moon, the detec­tives were too good at antic­i­pat­ing the twists, which sucked some of the sus­pense out of the book. I think that Deaver han­dles his sur­prises bet­ter in The Bro­ken Win­dow; he keeps both the reader and the pro­tag­o­nists guess­ing. I also like that Deaver basi­cally sticks to a sin­gle plot in this book, rather than the inter­weav­ing of numer­ous sub­plots that he uses in some ear­lier books.

The only annoy­ance this novel holds for me has to do with Deaver’s dis­cus­sions of com­put­ers (which play a cen­tral role). His use of tech­no­log­i­cal terms and jar­gon feels slightly off in places, although he has improved a great deal sine The Blue Nowhere, his hacker mys­tery. This is a minor fault, though, and prob­a­bly wouldn’t bother any­one who isn’t some­what of a com­puter nerd.