The Coffin Dancer

In 1998, mystery writer Jeffery Deaver published The Coffin Dancer, the second in the series of novels that feature his regular quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme. Rhyme is the NYPD’s foremost criminologist, but, because of a horrible accident in the line of duty, he can now only move his head, shoulders, and left ring finger. To continue solving crimes, Rhyme relies on the footwork of detective Amelia Sachs, a group of forensic lab techs, and a state of the art voice-activated computer.

Five years before the start of the novel, two of Rhyme’s lab techs were killed by a wastebasket bomb. The killer was never found, and the only clue to his identity was a distinctive tattoo: a Grim Reaper dancing with a woman in front of a coffin on the man’s upper arm. Nicknamed the Coffin Dancer, the killer has continued to evade capture because of his amazing disguise skills. To make Rhyme’s connection to the Coffin Dancer even more personal, one of the lab techs killed was a woman Rhyme was in love with.

Now, it looks like the Coffin Dancer is killing once again. A brilliant hitman, the Coffin Dancer has been hired to eliminate three witnesses – the executives of the Hudson Air charter flight company – who have evidence incriminating arms smuggler Phillip Hansen.



Using his distinctive bomb-making style, the killer first targets Edward Carney, a pilot who is also the vice president of Hudson Air. The bomb, an altitude-triggered explosive, goes off in mid-air, killing everyone aboard. When the forensics link the bomb fragments to the wastebasket explosion, Rhyme joins the case, assuming that Hansen has hired someone to take out everyone whose testimony could put him in prison. The mission of the NYPD and the FBI is to prevent the assassination of the other two witnesses – Ed Carney’s widow, Percy, who is the president of Hudson Air, and another pilot, Brit Hale – during the 48 hours before they are supposed to testify in court.

While Amelia Sachs is collecting tire scrapings from the emergency vehicles that responded to the airplane explosion because Percy remembers there being a strange black van at the scene, the man responsible for the bomb strikes again. Stephen Kall, an unhinged and slightly off-kilter hitman, had met and befriended Sheila Horowitz when arranging Edward’s murder. Now, to tie up loose ends, he meets her in a Starbucks, takes her back to her house, and kills her. He then rigs up an explosive that goes off just after the investigators arrive, but they are still able to recover a partial fingerprint from a roll of duck tape.

A distraught Percy talks her police escort Jerry into letting her go to the airport. There, Stephen strikes again. In an attack that goes awry, he shoots Jerry, also killing a painting contractor that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The painter’s body is found missing its face and hands – obviously an attempt to keep him from being identified. By this point, Sachs has been able to gather enough evidence to link the painter’s killer to Sheila’s murderer.



After Stephen flees from the airport, he connects with Jodie, a homeless man and hires him to be a lookout. However, the police soon come across Jodie as they comb an abandoned subway for Stephen. In custody, Jodie at first resists, but soon tells the police everything he knows about Stephen and his plans.

Rhyme figures out that Stephen’s next target will be the safehouse where Percy and Brit are being kept safe. However, it is too late – Stephen is already there, disguised as a fireman. As Rhyme’s computer malfunctions in a way that prevents him from calling out to the safehouse team to watch out for Stephen, the tension mounts. Stephen stabs the protecting officer, Roland Bell, and then shoots and kills Brit Hale.

In the confusion, Percy goes back to the airport and tries to escape from the situation in one of Hudson Air’s remaining planes. Unbeknownst to her, the killer has put another altitude bomb on this plane – but she sees it just in time to land before triggering it. She returns to the safehouse once again.



In the meantime, the police find yet another dismembered body at the park: a man with his hands, teeth, face, and jaw missing, which makes identifying him almost impossible.

Soon, the partial prints found at the scene of Sheila’s death are matched with Stephen Kall – it seems as though he should now be the target of the police and FBI searches. However, just in the nick of time, Rhyme figures out that the hand-less and face-less body found in the park is Stephens – which means that he isn’t the Coffin Dancer.

Instead, Rhyme realizes, the Coffin Dancer is actually Jodie. Pretending to be a homeless man, the Coffin Dancer used his incredible understanding of people to win the trust of Stephen Kall. Jodie’s plan was to get Stephen to carry out the killings, and then to kill him, thus avoiding being associated with the crimes. Now, Jodie (under his guise as a police informant) has been allowed access to the same safehouse where the last remaining witness, Percy, is being protected. At the novel’s climax, Sachs infiltrates the safehouse, finds Jodie, and shoots him before he can get to Percy.



In a last-ditch effort, Jodie tries to have Rhyme declared incompetent. However, this ruse fails and Jodie/the Coffin Dancer ends up in prison. Percy testifies against Hansen. Finally, the truth about who hired the hits on Hudson Air employees is revealed: it wasn’t Hansen. Instead, it was Ron Talbot, the airline’s co-owner who has been embezzling from the business and wanted to cover his tracks.

The novel ends with Rhyme and Sachs expressing their love for each other and ending up in a relationship.