Now a gripping TV series starring Russell Hornsby and Michael Imperioli! From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Bone Collector and The Devil’s Teardrop a spine-chilling thriller that puts renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against the ultimate opponent—Amelia Sachs , his own brilliant protégé. A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Lincoln 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 peculiar teenage truant known as the Insect Boy, so nicknamed for his disturbing obsession with bugs. 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 who 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. With the intricate forensic detail, breathtaking speed, and masterful plot twists that are signature Deaver, The Empty Chair is page-turning suspense of the highest order. "New York Post" Masterful....[Lincoln Rhyme] is the most brilliant and most vulnerable of crime fiction's heroes. "The New York Times Book Review" A pulse-racing chase. "The New York Times Book Review" A twisted thriller...[of] scientific smarts and psychological cunning. Jeffery Deaver is the #1 internationally bestselling author of forty-four novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages. His first novel featuring Lincoln Rhyme, The Bone Collector , was made into a major motion picture starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie and a hit television series on NBC. He’s received or been shortlisted for a number of awards around the world, including Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers and the Steel Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association in the United Kingdom. In 2014, he was the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards. He has been named a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. The Empty Chair . . . chapter one She came here to lay flowers at the place where the boy died and the girl was kidnapped. She came here because she was a heavy girl and had a pocked face and not many friends. She came because she was expected to. She came because she wanted to. Ungainly and sweating, twenty-six-year-old Lydia Johansson walked along the dirt shoulder of Route 112, where she’d parked her Honda Accord, then stepped carefully down the hill to the muddy bank where Blackwater Canal met the opaque Paquenoke River. She came here because she thought it was the right thing to do. She came even though she was afraid. It wasn’t long after dawn but this August had been the hottest in years in North Carolina and Lydia was already sweating through her nurse’s whites by the time she started toward the clearing on the riverbank, surrounded by willows and tupelo gum and broad-leafed bay trees. She easily found the place she was looking for; the yellow police tape was very evident through the haze. Early morning sounds. Loons, an animal foraging in the thick brush nearby, hot wind through sedge and swamp grass. Lord, I’m scared, she thought. Flashing back vividly on the most gruesome scenes from the Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels she read late at night with her companion, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. More noises in the brush. She hesitated, looked around. Then continued on. “Hey,” a man’s voice said. Very near. Lydia gasped and spun around. Nearly dropped the flowers. “Jesse, you scared me.” “Sorry.” Jesse Corn stood on the other side of a weeping willow, near the clearing that was roped off. Lydia noticed that their eyes were fixed on the same thing: a glistening white outline on the ground where the boy’s body’d been found. Surrounding the line indicating Billy’s head was a dark stain that, as a nurse, she recognized immediately as old blood. “So that’s where it happened,” she whispered. “It is, yep.” Jesse wiped his forehead and rearranged the floppy hook of blond hair. His uniform—the beige outfit of the Paquenoke County Sheriff’s Department—was wrinkled and dusty. Dark stains of sweat blossomed under his arms. He was thirty and boyishly cute. “How long you been here?” she asked. “I don’t know. Since five maybe.” “I saw another car,” she said. “Up the road. Is that Jim?” “Nope.