I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. —Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906
The federal Constitution is perhaps the greatest
of human experiments…
Ok! Everybody, as soon as I started reading The Kill Room, I immediately recognized the name of the main character and even recognized the name of the star who played Rhyme in The Bone Collector. None other than Denzel Washington, with Angelina Jolie as his sidekick, detective and lover... I loved this story and I loved The Kill Room in quite a different way... Although this book was written well before our present chaos, it seems there is always a similar type of situation which brings about strange and unusual events by individuals working in politics!
You know what I mean, a madman in a highly powerful office. A secret group who deals with murder and retribution... And many innocent people who become enmeshed within a web of lies and deceit that will ultimately collapse from unbelievable, unauthorized evil acts...
.jfif)
SUSSS, SUSSS… In his kitchen Jacob Swann sipped a Vermentino, a light pleasant Italian wine, in this case from Liguria. He returned to honing his knife, a Kai Shun, though not the slicer. This was an eight-and-a-half-inch Deba model for chopping and for removing large pieces of meat intact. Susss, susss, susss… He stroked from side to side, on the Arkansas whetstone, his personal style for sharpening. Never in a circle. The hour was around 8 p.m. Jazz played on his turntable. Larry Coryell, the guitarist. He excelled at standards, his own compositions and even classical. “Pavane for a Dead Princess” was an unmatched interpretation. Aproned, Swann stood at the butcher-block island. Not long ago he’d received a text from headquarters complimenting him on his work today, confirming that he’d made the right decision to delay the attack on Sachs. Shreve Metzger had provided yet more info but there was nothing more to do at the moment. He could stand down for the evening. And he was taking advantage of that. The lights were low, the shades and curtains drawn. There was, in a way, a sense of romance in the air. Swann looked at the woman sitting nearby. Her hair was down, she wore one of his T-shirts, black, and plaid boxers, also his. He believed he could smell a floral scent, laced with spice. Smell and flavor are inextricably linked. Swann never cooked anything of importance when he had a cold or a sinus infection. Why waste the effort? Eating at a time like that meant the food was simply fuel. A sin. The woman, whose name was Carol Fiori—odd moniker for a Brit—looked back. She was crying softly. Occasionally she’d make the uhn uhn uhn sound, like earlier. Carol was the jogger who had approached him in the alleyway earlier and ruined his chance to disable Amelia Sachs. A throat-punch and into the trunk she’d gone. He’d driven off quickly, returning home. He’d get the detective later. Once back in Brooklyn, he’d dragged Carol into the house. While she initially said she was traveling with “friends,” she was actually single and touring the United States on her own for a month, thinking of writing an article about her adventures. Alone… He’d been debating what to do with his trophy. Now he knew. Yes, no? Yes. She’d given up staring at him pleadingly and whispering pleadingly and now turned her damp eyes to the Deba as he sharpened susss, susss. She shook her head occasionally. Swann had bound her wrists and legs to a very nice and comfortable Mission-style chair, à la Lydia Foster. “Please,” she mouthed, her eyes on the blade. So the pleading wasn’t quite abandoned. He examined the knife himself, tested the edge carefully with his thumb. It gave just the right resistance; perfect sharpness. He sipped more wine and then began to remove ingredients from the refrigerator. When Jacob Swann was a boy, long before college, long before the military, long before his career after the military, he came to appreciate the value of meals. The only moments when he could count on spending time with his mother and father involved preparing and eating supper. Bulky Andrew Swann was not stern or abusive, simply distant and forever lost in his schemes, obligations and distractions, which derived mostly from his job in the gambling world of Atlantic City. Young Jacob never knew exactly what his father did—given his own present career, Andrew might have been on the enforcement side of things. That genetic stuff. But the one thing that Jacob and his mother knew about the man was that he liked to eat and that you could get his attention and hold it through food. Marianne was not a natural cook, probably had hated it. She’d begun to work on her skills only after she and Andrew started dating. Jacob had overheard her tell a woman friend about one of the first meals she’d served. “Whatsis?” Andrew had demanded. “Hamburger Helper and lima beans and—” “You told me you could cook.” “But I did.” She’d waved at the frying pan. Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound. So she’d bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work. In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pansautéing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn’t learn first principles and rules (it’s all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she’d never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted—though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren’t over, at all. Unlike her son, Marianne stressed mightily before and during the preparation of each meal and invariably had more than one glass of wine. A bit of whiskey too. Or whatever was in the cabinet. But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew’s presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee—Andrew didn’t sip—he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fxxx a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fxxxing. After school or weekends, if he wasn’t slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too. Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Marianne seemed to think that a boy would be more inclined to use a knife than an egg beater. “Look at that, honey. Good job. You’re my little butcher man!” He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine. Now Swann looked at the woman strapped to his chair. He continued to be angry that she’d ruined his plans that afternoon. She continued to cry. He returned to preparing his three-course dinner for tonight. The starter would be asparagus steamed in a water-vermouth mixture, infused with a fresh bay leaf and a pinch of sage. The spears would rest on a bed of mâche and be dotted with homemade hollandaise sauce—that verb being key, “dotted,” since anytime yolk meets butter, you can easily overdo. The trick about asparagus, of course, is timing. The Romans had a cliché—doing something in the duration it took to cook asparagus meant doing it quickly. Swann sipped the wine and prepared the steamer liquid. He then trimmed the herbs from his window box. When his mother left them—wine plus eighty-two mph without a seat belt—sixteen-year-old Jacob took over the cooking. Just the two of them, dad and son. The teenager did the same as his mother, corralling Andrew with meals, the only differences being that the boy enjoyed the act of cooking and was far better than his mother. He took to serving serial courses—like a chef’s tasting menu—to stretch out the time the men could be together. One other difference emerged eventually: He found he liked the cooking better than the hour or so spent consuming the meal; he realized he didn’t really like his father very much. The man didn’t want to talk about the things that Jacob did: video games, kickboxing, wrestling, hunting, guns in general and bare-knuckle boxing. Andrew didn’t want to talk about much at all except Andrew. Once, when Jacob was eighteen, his father returned home with a beautiful, a really beautiful blonde. He had told the woman what a good cook “my kid is.” Like he was showing off a tacky pinkie ring. He’d said to Jacob, “Make Cindi here something nice, okay? Make something nice for the pretty lady.” Jacob was well aware of E. coli by then. Yet as much as he wanted to see twenty-four-year-old Cindi retch to death, or at least retch, he couldn’t bring himself to intentionally ruin a dish. He received raves from the woman for his chicken Cordon Bleu, which he made not by pounding the poultry breast flat but by slicing the meat into thin sheets to enwrap the Gruyère cheese and—in his recipe—prosciutto ham from Parma. Butcher man… Not long after that, terrorism struck the nation. When Jacob enlisted in the army, the question of aptitude and interests came up but he didn’t let on he could cook, for fear he’d be assigned to mess hall kitchens for the next four years. He knew there’d be no pleasure in cooking steam-table food for a thousand soldiers at a time. Mostly he wanted to kill people. Or make them scream. Or both. He didn’t see a big distinction between humans and animals for slaughter. In fact, think about it, beef cattle and lambs were innocent and we sliced them up without a second thought; people, on the other hand, were all guilty of some transgression or another, yet we’re oh so reluctant to apply the bullet or knife. Some of us. He regarded Carol once more. She was very muscular but pale. Maybe she worked out in gyms mostly or wore sunscreen when she ran. He offered her some wine. She shook her head. He gave her water and she drank half the bottle as he held it. His second course for this evening would be a variation on potatoes Anna. Sliced and peeled russets, layered in a spiral and then cooked in butter and olive oil, with plenty of sea salt and pepper. In the middle would be a dollop of crème fraîche, which he whipped up with, of all things, a little—very little—fresh maple syrup. To finish, black truffle slivers. This dish he made in a small cast-iron skillet. He would start the potatoes on the stove then crisp the top under the Miele’s broiler. Potatoes and maple and truffles. Who would have thought? Okay, he was getting hungry. When Jacob was in his early twenties, his father died of what could be called gastric problems, though not ulcers or tumors. Four 9mm rounds to the belly. The young soldier had vowed revenge but nothing ever came of that. A lot of people might have killed the man—Andrew, it turned out, had been up to all kinds of double crosses he should have known were not a good idea in Atlantic City. Finding the killers would have taken ages. Besides, truth be told, Jacob wasn’t all that upset. In fact, when he hosted a reception after the funeral, the murderer might very well have been among the business associates who’d attended. There was, however, some subtle vengeance played out at the event. The main course was penne alla puttanesca, the spicy tomato-based dish whose name in Italian means “in the style of a whore.” He’d made it in honor of his father’s present girlfriend, who wasn’t Cindi but could easily have been. Tonight, Jacob Swann’s third course, the main course, would be special. The Moreno assignment had been difficult and he wanted to pamper himself. The entrée would be Veronique-style, which he prepared with grapes sliced into disks and shallots, equally thin, in a beurre blanc sauce—made with slightly less wine (he never used vinegar) because of the presence of the grapes. He would slice the very special meat into nearly translucent ovals, dredge them in type 45 French pastry flour then quickly sauté them in a blend of olive oil and butter (always the two, of course; butter alone burns faster than an overturned tanker). He offered Carol more water. She wasn’t interested. She’d given up. “Relax,” he whispered. The liquid was boiling in the asparagus steamer, the potatoes browning nicely under the broiler, the oil and butter slowly heating, off-gassing their lovely perfume. Swann wiped down the cutting board he’d use to slice the meat for the main course. But before getting to work, the wine. He opened and poured a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a Cloudy Bay, one of the best on the planet. He’d debated about the vineyard’s fine sparkling wine, the Pelorus, but he didn’t think he could finish a whole bottle alone, and bubbles, of course, don’t keep.
~~~
RET - TOP SECRET - TOP SECRET - TOP SE SPECIAL TASK ORDERS QUEUE 8/27 Task: Robert A. Moreno (NIOS ID: ram278e4w5) Born: 4/75, New Jersey Complete by: 5/8–5/9 Approvals:
Level Two: Yes
Level One: Yes Supporting Documentation: See “A” Confirmation required: Yes PIN required: Yes CD: Approved, but minimize Details: Specialist assigned: Don Bruns, Kill Room. South Cove Inn, Bahamas, Suite 1200 Status: Closed 9/27 Task: Al-Barani Rashid (NIOS ID: abr942pd5t) Born: 2/73, Michigan Complete by: 5/19 Approvals:
Level Two: Yes
Level One: Yes Supporting Documentation: N/R Confirmation required: No
It was all so very organized, task was identified, task was assigned, and task was reviewed and approved by all those necessary. Task Completed...
At the end of that task, the body of Robert A. Moreno was found...
But somebody had leaked the Top Secret Task Order and an Attorney was on the case! Knowing, however, that she would be going against the United States government, she chose to seek out Lincoln Rhyme who was often used as a consultant on difficult cases. And, oh yes, the attorney decided to work right along with them, although Sachs was not thrilled about that, noticing that she rarely interacted with Rhyme, while taking credit for Sachs work and using it to provide reports to her boss...Lincoln had been the best forensics specialist for multiple years, multiple cases. Now, he was a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair at all times, except to sleep. He was paralyzed from the neck down, but had recently gained some use of one of his arms and was scheduled for an operation to attempt to do the same for his other arm.
But Lincoln's brain was fully functional and that is what he used to solve many cases... To assist, Amelia Sachs had decided to work with him on cases, along with a rookie cop who wanted to learn more about forensics. Thom was always there as his medical caretaker and friend, who got involved as much as he was needed... This time when Rhyme decided, for the first time in years, to go onsite to try to find evidence related to the murder of Moreno... Thom was there when it happened...
Rhyme soon discovered that getting hold of any evidence had been prevented by locals. However, one of those individuals had become a whistleblower to call Rhyme as soon as he learned he was on the case. No matter what, the trip to the Bahamas was unsuccessful, at the same time, became dangerous, as a group of thugs cornered the group on a beach--and Rhyme was pushed into the ocean!
At the same time, back in America, Sachs had traced the movements of Moreno and had found a restaurant where he had stopped, who also had security cameras... While she and the owner were reviewing videos and discussing with workers there, somebody had moved into the back office, hoping to steal the computer... Too big, he left a bomb and Sachs ran back into the room just as he was leaving...and the bomb was exploding...
Tell you one thing, Deaver knows how to close a chapter, leaving you hanging, while he goes back to another scene and does the same thing! I was holding my breath, even knowing that two main characters could not be killed during a case, but, still feeling great relief when learning what happened!
So, the entire trip was wasted since what they called the Kill Room, had already been turned back to the hotel and had been completely repaired and painted! Soon, everybody was thinking--who exactly is in charge of this secret group, who had the authority to order people to be killed, either for crimes or retribution... And, how could there not be evidence in the Kill Room! Even if it had been cleared by local police...
And then one day, while Lincoln sat in front of their whiteboards, reviewing the bits and pieces of evidence, people involved, and the possible reasons for the assassination of Moreno, he realized something very important... and that turned the entire case in an entirely new direction...
Jeffery Deaver is a top writer in mystery/thrillers... And he even shares many of his own recipes in this book where murder and master chef merges... His Lincoln Rhyme series (17 published) is still going strong and presents some of his best stories! Do check out the series, starting with his first, The Bone Collector (or watch the movie if you prefer)... That's how I came to know Jeffery Deaver's work!
GABixlerReviews
Jim from New Jersey lined everyone up against what he said was a gunwale, though nobody knew exactly what that was—he didn’t either—but it seemed very nautical and fun to say. “Nobody sing the Titanic song.” There’d been a lot of that, especially as the bars remained open late into the night, but the truth was that very few people, men or women, could bring off the treacly song like Celine Dion. “Is that Florida?” somebody asked. One of the Sallys, Jim from New Jersey believed. He saw a dim line on the horizon but that was probably just a layer of clouds. “Not yet, I don’t think.” “But what’s that? It’s a building.” “Oh, that’s the oil rig.
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| Out in May, 2025 |
