Friday, February 02, 2007

Cujo (1981)

cujo.jpg   Summary:  Cujo belongs to the Cambers, a family living outside of Castle Rock where father Joe does mechanic work. While hunting in the fields around the Cambers' house, Cujo is bitten by a bat infected with rabies. While Cujo begins to succumb to the disease, Joe's son and wife leave on a trip to visit relatives. Soon after Cujo loses control, the dog attacks and kills the Cambers' neighbor, Gary Pervier. Joe arrives in order to pick up Gary for their own vacation while his wife is away and finds Gary dead. Before he is able to call the police, Cujo kills him as well. The Trentons -- Vic, Donna, and four-year-old Tad -- are having problems of their own as Vic discovers that his wife has been cheating on him. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's business is failing, and he is forced to leave on a business trip to Boston and New York. Donna, home alone with Tad, takes their failing Ford Pinto to the Cambers' for repairs. However, the car breaks down when they reach the farm. Thus, with no one at the Camber home except for Cujo, a three day struggle begins to outlast the dog in a siege of the stalled car. Hunger, thirst, and fantasies of escape methods conspire to tease Donna and Tad during the hottest summer in Castle Rock history. The sheriff of Castle Rock, George Bannerman, arrives fortuitously and is himself killed by the dog. In the end, Vic, worried that his wife has not answered the phone at home, returns to Castle Rock and figures out where they are. Yet by the time he gets there, Donna has killed Cujo in a gory showdown and Tad has died of dehydration (in the movie, Tad survives as producers felt that the death of a child would be too horrifying).

Well, you'll never look at a dog in the same way after this!!!

Posted by Gra at 09:18:09 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Lincoln Rhyme Stories by Jeffery Deaver

bone.jpg  The Bone Collector (1997) Lincoln Rhyme, ex-head of NYPD forensics, was the nation's foremost criminalist, the man who could work a crime scene and come away with a perfect profile of the killer, frozen in time. Now, Lincoln is frozen in place — permanently. An accident on the job left him a quadriplegic who can move just one finger, a great mind strapped to his bed, mulish and sarcastic, hiding from a life he no longer wants to live.
Until he sees the crime-scene report about a corpse found buried on a deserted West Side railroad track, its bloody hand rising from the dirt. It belonged to a man who got into a cab at the airport and never got out. Reluctantly, Lincoln Rhyme abandons retirement to track down a killer whose ingenious clues hold the secret to saving his victims — if Rhyme can decipher them in time. The search leads him to the Bone Collector, whose obsession with old New York colors every scrap of evidence he leaves for Rhyme and his new partner, Amelia Sachs, whom he drafts as his arms and legs. But she's never worked a crime scene in her life — and he can only whisper in her ear as she does the exacting work he loved more than anything else.

coffin.jpg  The Coffin Dancer (1998) Detective Lincoln Rhymes, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is put on the trail of the Coffin Dancer, a cunning professional killer who has continually alluded the police. Rhymes - a quadriplegic since a line-of-duty accident — must use his wits to track this brilliant killer who's been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. Rhyme works with his eyes and ears, New York City cop Amelia Sachs, to gather information from trace evidence at the crime scene to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off.
So far, they have only one clue: the assasin has a tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a coffin.

chair.jpg  The Empty Chair (2000) This spine-chilling new thriller pits renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against the ultimate opponent — Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protégée.
A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Rhyme is desperate to improve his condition and goes to the University of North Carolina Medical Center for high-risk experimental surgery. But he and Sachs have hardly settled in when the local authorities come calling. In a twenty-four-hour period, the sleepy Southern outpost of Tanner's Corner has seen a local teen murdered and two young women abducted. And Rhyme and Sachs are the best chance to find the girls alive.
The prime suspect is a strange teenaged truant known as the Insect Boy, so nicknamed for his disturbing obsession with bugs. Rhyme agrees to find the boy while awaiting his operation. Rhyme's unsurpassed analytical skills and stellar forensic experience, combined with Sachs's exceptional detective legwork, soon snare the perp. But even Rhyme can't anticipate that Sachs will disagree with his crime analysis and that her vehemence will put her in the swampland, harboring the very suspect whom Rhyme considers a ruthless killer. So ensues Rhyme's greatest challenge — facing the criminalist whom he has taught everything he knows in a battle of wits, forensics, and intuition. And in this adversary, Rhyme also faces his best friend and soul mate.

stone.jpg  The Stone Monkey (2002) Recruited to help the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service perform the nearly impossible, Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, manage to track down a cargo ship headed for New York City carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as "the Ghost."
But when the Ghost's capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race against time: to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who have escaped from the ship and vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of New York City's Chinese community.
Over the next harrowing forty-eight hours, the Ghost brilliantly and ruthlessly hunts for the families, while Rhyme, aided by a quirky policeman from mainland China, struggles to find them before they die, and Amelia Sachs pursues a very different kind of police work — forming a connection with one of the immigrants that may affect her relationship with her partner and lover, Lincoln Rhyme.

man.jpg  The Vanished Man (2003) It begins at a prestigious music school in New York City.  A killer flees the scene of a homicide and locks himself in a classroom.  Within minutes, the police have him surrounded. When a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot, they break down the door. The room is empty.
Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation. For the ambitious Sachs, solving the case could earn her a promotion. For the quadriplegic Rhyme, it means relying on his protégée to ferret out a master illusionist they've dubbed "the conjurer" who baits them with gruesome murders that become more diabolical with each fresh crime. As the fatalities rise and the minutes tick down, Rhyme and Sachs must move beyond the smoke and mirrors to prevent a terrifying act of vengeance that could become the greatest vanishing act of all.

12card.jpg  The Twelfth Card (2005) A high-school girl in Harlem, Geneva Settle, is the target of a ruthless professional killer—Thompson Boyd—who has been hired to murder her for reasons unknown. His first attempt, in a deserted museum early one morning, is a failure but it's clear to Lincoln Rhyme that he's going to strike again, from clues the killer leaves behind, one of which is the twelfth card in the tarot deck, The Hanged Man, whose meaning resonates eerily throughout the story.
Assisted by Fred Dellray, Mel Cooper and Lon Sellitto (suffering from a severe case of shattered nerves due to a near miss by the killer), Rhyme and partner Amelia Sachs work frantically to learn who the hit man and his partner are and when they will strike next, all the while trying to crack a very "cold" case: Rhyme believes that Geneva may have been targeted because of a paper she's writing about her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a former slave who was instrumental in the civil rights movement in the 1860s, but who was arrested for theft and disgraced.
In his correspondence Charles wrote about a "secret," that could have tragic consequences if revealed. This secret, which Rhyme is convinced will provide the key to why Geneva is in danger, revolves around some mysterious doings in the area known as Gallows Heights, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that in the 1860s was a tense mix of wealthy financiers, civil rights leaders, political crooks like Boss Tweed, and working-class laborers and thugs. What was the truth behind the crime Charles was accused of? And what was his secret? Does it have to do with stolen gold? Or does it have a far broader implications?
Other complications keep the pot boiling: Rhyme is struggling through extensive therapy; will it have any effect on his quadriplegic conditions? And fiercely independent Geneva Settle battles both the killers and her protectors to maintain order in her life so that she can escape from Harlem to college and Europe as soon as possible.

I read the first book of the serie coz a friend lent it to me, after seeing the movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie (btw take a look http://www.universalpictures.com/bonecollector/index.html ) and I liked Deaver style to write detectives' stories. From  book one, I wait any Rhyme adventure with so much pleasure.

Posted by Gra at 14:35:14 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |