On a frigid December night, an eerie pattern emerges from two equally brutal murder scenes, where a killer's calling card is a moon-faced clock that seemingly ticked away the victims' last moments. From his wheelchair, criminologist Lincoln Rhyme tracks the Watchmaker, a time-obsessed genius. With every passing second, the Watchmaker is moving with razor-sharp precision to his next act of perfectly orchestrated violence -- and Rhyme can't afford to have his trusted partner, Amelia Sachs, distracted by a daunting homicide case of her own. Up against a brilliant madman, Rhyme and Sachs are locked in a blood-chilling race with their deadliest enemy: time itself....

The story was good but I didn't like the ending.
How could a team of top class detectives got fooled by the villain after the final countdown? the final move of the clockmaker was sudden and not original. There appears to be some sections missing before the ending and I felt a question mark banging in my head.

Brand new Detective third-grade Amelia Sachs has been assigned her first solo case; looking into the suicide/suspected homicide of a man named Creeley. She uncovers another homicide among precinct 118, and ties the two together. During her investigations she discovers many of the 118 hang out at a bar called The St. James, and even worse, suspects a ring of bribes and extortion involving officers from 118. Interviewing retired cop Art Snyder, Sachs is devastated by the news that her deceased father, also a cop, was on the take just like the guys at 118. Sachs worships her father, and the news cuts her to the bone; horrible enough to cause her to consider quitting the force and going into private security.

Meanwhile, Sachs is also assisting Lincoln Rhyme in his new case he calls "The Watchmaker". Two brutal murders, each with a strange clock left at the scenes, the clocks having a mechanism that track the lunar cycles. It's a full moon, and The Watchmaker has a taste for his work. Returning from book six (The Twelfth Card) is young officer Ron Pulaski. Despite his severe head injury in the past, causing him occasional dizziness and PTSD symptoms, Ron fights on to be the best cop he can be. According to Amelia Sachs, Ron has "guts", and she's happy to have him working with her on the Creeley case, and assisting Rhyme with The Watchmaker.

Gerald Duncan - The Watchmaker - likes leaving calling cards behind on his scenes, but is careful to leave very little forensic evidence. He knows he's being tracked by the best, but knows that only he can outsmart the famous Lincoln Rhyme. With him is his assistant Vincent Reynolds. Vincent doesn't have much going on upstairs; he refers to himself in different titles such as Big Vincent, Clever Vincent, Hungry Vincent, etc. His real appetite, however, is rape. He's struck a deal to help The Watchmaker kill people as long as he can have the women afterward. In exchange, he shows The Watchmaker around town.

There's three new characters added to the cast. Thom's (Lincoln's assistant) elderly aunt passed away and left Thom with her Havanese dog Jackson. Lt. Dennis Baker is assisting Rhyme on his Watchmaker case, adding a little pull to Rhyme's sometimes unusual requests. Kathryn Dance is in town, from the California Bureau Of Investigations. Her specialty is interrogation and Kinesics - she "reads" people during interviews and confessions, and can accurately tell when they are lying. (Jeffrey Deaver has since written a book called The Sleeping Doll which stars Kathryn Dance, should you find yourself as intrigued by her character as I did)

Things are not always what they seem, and people are often enigmas; 'The Cold Moon' has more twists and turns than a winding highway. Just when you think you've got a character or scenario figured out, Deaver shocks you by morphing into someone or something else. And this time, he has a surprise for you at the ending. If you're a fan of Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme character like I am, your going to love this 7th book in the series. Pop some popcorn and get ready to settle down for a long read, you won't be able to put the book down. Highly recommended. Enjoy!

This is another Lincoln Rhyme novel that doesn't disappoint.

As always, Deaver is an outstanding story teller who maintains the reader's interest by consistently adding clever twists and thoroughly researched details to the plot.

The rug gets pulled out from under the reader so often, that its hard to imagine that somehow everything ties back together at the end.

There are also some surprise appearances by characters from earlier Rhyme novels, which will appeal to just about anyone who has kept up with this series.

Will publishers please stop paying Deaver to write the same book over and over again? The characters are getting bland. I think it's time to retire Rhyme and Sachs.

I have been a huge fan of Deaver's books since The Bone Collector. However, despite repeated efforts to get into The Cold Moon, I had to give up on it after only a third of the way through. For as long as I was able to stay with The Cold Moon, I found, atypical of Deaver's other Lincoln Rhyme books, the bad guys to be one-dimensional and uninteresting, the plot to be slow-moving and filled with excessive detail about the "science" involved in the investigation, there was too little action and the action that did occur was somewhat unbelievable and convoluted, and that Deaver provided nothing new in terms of developing the relationship between Lincoln Rhyme and Amanda Sachs. Perhaps if I had the patience to continue reading The Cold Moon my opinion would have been different; but after reading many of the other Amazon reader reviews, I didn't hold out much hope. Thus, given that I have so many books and so little time to read them, I decided to put The Cold Moon aside and move on to my next book. I'm still a Deaver fan and will read his next book -- but for the first time, I have been disappointed in a Lincoln Rhyme mystery.