Best selling author Jeffrey Deaver's way of pushing the mystery genre to extremes may account for why he's at the pinnacle of it. In his latest Lincoln Rhyme novel he demonstrates masterful control over overlapping strands of mystery, each requiring its own resolution and the best high-tech sleuthing that his quadriplegic forensic detective Rhyme, beautiful proteg‚ Amelia Sachs, and the rest of his investigative team can muster. To the very last gasp, he holds his audience in a state of suspension as each layer of mystery strips away to reveal the next.

How Harlem high-schooler Geneva Settle becomes the central target of a murder contract starts at the Museum of African-American Culture and History where she's come to read a micro-fiche article in the 1868 edition of Coloreds' Weekly Illustrated. She's researching her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a freedman, a farmer, a teacher and a veteran, for a term paper. But, even more, her thirst for knowledge about him is a visceral need to complete her own sense of identity. What is most vexing is that the Civil War veteran was accused of a crime that would be entirely antithetical to his known standards of conduct.

Alone in the deserted fifth-floor library, the short, skinny and boyish girl reads the chapter that she expects will explain why the ex-slave had to run for his life and, hopefully, how he cleared up the dishonor on his name. She reads with an intensity that engulfs her mind in the events of 140 years earlier... until a sound interrupts her reading and brings her back to 2005.

It's the sound of trouble and the beginning of an attack on her that seems inexplicable. Worse, the other person in the solitary room is as proficient as he is single-minded in attacking her. The manner in which Geneva outsmarts and escapes from Thompson Boyd is the first of many cleverly choreographed set pieces of terrifying confrontation, drawing upon the author's considerable ingenuity.

When Lincoln Rhymes is brought into the case, Amelia Sachs runs the crime scene in the museum library for clues to the attacker's identity. She experiences an "Oh, yes!" moment when she finds a bag that Geneva's attacker left behind, containing a roll of duct tape, a box cutter, condoms... a rape kit! But leaving it behind proves to be Boyd's artistry at misdirection. Included in the bag is a tarot card of a man hanging upside down under a Roman numeral for twelve. The Twelfth Card. The crime team doesn't yet know that they have an ace killer on their hands, but that becomes evident minutes later when Boyd, hidden in an alley across the street, expertly guns down a witness outside the museum as he's standing before detective Lon Stellito, being debriefed.

When Geneva is brought into Rhymes' analytic aura and headquarters, the brave teen is more concerned with keeping her own secrets and in taking a class test than being protected from harm. Missing the test, she says, is "whack." While a contest of wills goes on between law enforcement and scholarship, Stellito is dealing with the depression and self-doubt of having someone killed in front of him and being helpless to avoid it. Sach's recognizes the officer's need for psychological rebuilding and, in a terrific example of sensitivity and empathy, helps her fellow officer face up to his demons.

Rhyme's first line of reasoning is that something that happened back in 1868 may explain the mystery and lead to the killer's identity. But the virtually complete disappearance of archival documentation from research facilities is confounding. Add to that the appearance of "Jax," an ex-con, ex-tagger who is tracking Geneva with an intensity similar to Boyd's. And just who is paying the hitman whose next demonstration of expertise is rigging bombs on doors?

Rhyme's analytic solutions to crime, with his repertoire of tracing, scanning and electrostating, comes in an unrelieved pace of terror and suspense from cover to cover. The police procedural has rarely been so complex nor kept a highly trained sociopath at bay with cops that can actually thwart some of his most cunning efforts. That departure from stereotype is alone worth the read. Another is Deaver's delving into his characters' psychological makeup and, in this, he spares Rhymes' inner fears over his condition and tests of progress in recovering tactile sense no mercy. Deaver has an effective way to obscure a trail and maximize elements of suprise without disrespecting a reader's intelligence. As Geneva Settle might say, it's phat.

With all the crime scene investigation series that are so popular on TV these last seasons, you might think the lab work method of crime solving was a little exhausted by now. For all I know, Deaver may have started it all with his Lincoln Rhymes character and the commercial success of "The Bone Collector." In "The Twelfth Card," he's not only showing us that the forensic perspective is not in decline but, in a brilliant display of literary depth, he demonstrates how it's done. One might argue whether Deaver's the best mystery writer, but I can't think of anyone who excels his impressively crafted methodology.