Taking a job as an assistant to extreme sports enthusiast Will, who is wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident, Louisa struggles with her employer's acerbic moods and learns of his shocking plans before demonstrating to him that life is still worth living.

When he is fired as a consultant for the NYPD, Lincoln Rhyme decides to risk jail to solve a case involving “the Locksmith”—a sociopathic intruder who can break through any lock or security system ever devised, terrorizing the entire city.

An outspoken doctor and advocate for the right to die reconsiders her convictions when her fiance is rendered a quadriplegic by a motorcycle accident and begs to be allowed to end his life before dying from a rare form of heart failure that places the doctor under suspicion.

The Twelfth Card is a two-day cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of uptown Manhattan as quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs try to outguess Thompson Boyd a man whose past has turned him into a killing machine as unfeeling and cunning as a wolf. Boyd is after Geneva Settle, a high school girl from Harlem, and it's up to Lincoln and Amelia to figure out why.