The Broken Window- Jeffrey Deaver

The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Beware, you will not be able to put it down once you start reading. Thrilling would be a lesser word. The novel gives the details of the crime, the situation and the psychological reasons for making up his life. But what I like is his concept of 'the broken window'. Wikipedia defines 'broken window theory' as "a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime." When I was reading it, somehow, I cannot help think Foucault's theory of Panopticism which he formulated in his work 'Discipline and Punish'. The panopticon is used to for surveillance purposes, in the beginning in prisons, and later on in schools and other institutions. The novel narrates the issue of surveillance itself at the time of technological expansion and how data are used in the age of Internet and how can it turned out to be a trouble. Chilling, if you think further.

After a particular part of the novel, it seems the novel drags from the subject, but it is inevitable because the novelist needs to draw the characters, the formative stage of each and every character( of course not every, but main characters at least). This means, he needs to focus on the hero, Rhyme, his lover and fellow Sach, his cousin, and the villain and his victims. But somewhere I find it lacking something.

At one part of the novel, while the villain's stream of thought is going on, he recalls one experience from his childhood, especially the foster homes. Later on Detective Sach found that he is not the normal security man of SSD, but the former specialist before SSD was taken over by Sterling. He made the story that he was died in an accident, but later change his name and address to get a job as security guard in SSD. However, we won't get much more information about his transformation, except that from his childhood onwards he has this obsessive-compulsive disorder. Even then, I think, the writer should have given a little bit more information regarding this.

In the same way, I could not digest the relevance of the London operation which is mentioned in the book; maybe just to show that Lincoln Rhyme is a busy detective who got work from other places also. But I expected some more connection between this story and the main plot. If it does not have any connection with the main plot, avoiding some of the details might have helped to decrease the boredom some might feel while reading this. And the climax also could have been more colorful....



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