Lincoln Rhyme Books in Order

Before the series begins, Lincoln Rhyme led NYPD forensics and spent his career reconstructing crimes from physical evidence. After an accident at a crime scene left him quadriplegic, he was forced to retire. In The Bone Collector, he reluctantly returns to an investigation and directs Amelia Sachs, a police officer who has never processed a scene. This this case, Sachs searches and collects the evidence, and Rhyme examines it in the forensic laboratory in his Central Park West townhouse. At first, they do not work easily together, and they have small frictions as any starting team. But by the later books, Sachs is already an experienced detective and crime-scene investigator.

Start with The Bone Collector and continue in publication order. The main case is usually resolved within each novel, so the series is not one long investigation. What is a constant in each book is everything around those cases: Rhyme and Sachs’s changing relationship, the familiar people who continue working with them, and storylines such as the Watchmaker’s that disappear for several books before returning.

The page also lists the Lincoln Rhyme short stories and shows where they were later collected, along with the connected books and crossovers. For Deaver’s other series, standalone novels and complete bibliography, see the Jeffery Deaver books in order.

A printable book list is available below. You can print it or save it as a PDF.

Latest Lincoln Rhyme Releases

More upcoming releases:

• The Collateral Heart (Lincoln Rhyme #17, November 17, 2026)

Read it after The Bone Collector, once Rhyme’s circumstances and his arrangement with Sachs are familiar. As a companion book, it can be skipped without missing part of the story.

Connected Lincoln Rhyme Books and Crossovers

The Bone Collector and The Skin Collector

The Skin Collector is directly connected to the killer and the events that took place in The Bone Collector. The title is a direct reference, but saying much more would spoil part of the later book.

It should still be read as Book 11, after The Kill Room. Reading it straight after The Bone Collector would skip years of changes in the relationship that has been slowly developing between Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, her career and the people working with them. We return to that connection when we get to the book in its right order.

The Watchmaker Books in Order

The Watchmaker becomes Rhyme’s most persistent enemy and appears in three book:

1. The Cold Moon introduces the Watchmaker.
2. The Burning Wire brings him back in a second investigation that is taking place at the same time with the main electrical-grid case.
3. The Watchmaker’s Hand returns to the main conflict between Lincoln Rhyme and the Watchmaker.

These three books should be read in that order. You do not need to pull them out of the series and read them back-to-back, though. The novels published between them have their own cases and continue the lives of the main and secondary characters, but do not read The Watchmaker’s Hand before The Burning Wire or The Cold Moon, however.

Kathryn Dance and XO

Kathryn Dance first appears in The Cold Moon, where she joins Lincoln Rhyme’s investigation of the Watchmaker. She works for the California Bureau of Investigation and specializes in interrogation and kinesics, and the interpretation of body language. Rhyme trusts physical evidence much more than witnesses and their testimonies, and Dance prefers to actually read the people telling their stories. Initially, they are not very convinced by each other’s methods of getting to the truth.

The Sleeping Doll, published the following year, begins her own spin-off series. In that book, Rhyme and Sachs also appear briefly, and then Dance later returns in The Burning Wire.

XO is the third Kathryn Dance novel. Here, Rhyme and Sachs make a cameo appearance, which is why the author included it in his official book listing as a “small appearance.” If you’re only following the Lincoln Rhyme series, you can easily skip it and won’t lose any of his investigations.

If you want to follow Kathryn Dance in all the books she appeared, start with The Sleeping Doll, followed by Roadside Crosses and then XO. If you start with XO simply because Rhyme is in it, you get to her series two books late.

Other appearances: Rhymes With Prey brings Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs together with Lucas Davenport from John Sandford’s Prey series. It is a real crossover story, but it is optional for both series. See the complete John Sandford books in order.

Rhyme also has a short telephone cameo in Jeffery Deaver’s standalone novel The Devil’s Teardrop. That book’s main character, document examiner Parker Kincaid, later appears in The Vanished Man, the fifth Lincoln Rhyme book.

The Forensic Work in the Lincoln Rhyme Books

Lincoln Rhyme starts with whatever evidence he gets from the crime scene. It may be a fibre, soil caught in a shoe, dust, glass, blood, a mark on metal or a chemical residue that should not be there. Amelia Sachs has the job to find it and collect it correctly before the place is disturbed be it by the weather, emergency workers, curious passersby, or even the investigators at the scene.

In the early books, Rhyme directs her through every step. In this way, she learns to walk the grid and search an area systematically, to avoid rushing towards the most obvious clue she sees. Sachs becomes far more experienced as the series continues, but Rhyme remains very rigid about the whole process of what and where to collect the samples and how to get them to his laboratory. This does bring them to some friction during the cases.

Rhyme usually works through the results in his Central Park West townhouse. He adds each new finding to an evidence chart and compares it with what the team already knows. This way, the science is always closely connected to the case. They are testing a substance or arguing over a trace because another victim may still be alive, or because one result has sent the police to the wrong part of the city.

Jeffery Deaver changes the forensic problem from book to book. In The Bone Collector, the killer deliberately leaves physical clues that Rhyme must interpret before the killer strikes again. The Broken Window deals with evidence that looks quite convincing after someone has planted and manipulated it. The Burning Wire makes Rhyme understand how the electrical grid can be used as a weapon, and The Skin Collector brings tattoo ink, poison and markings on the victims into the current investigation.

This puts the series closer to criminalistics, trace evidence and crime-scene reconstruction than to the autopsy work in the Kay Scarpetta books or the skeletal identification in the Temperance Brennan series. Of course, the autopsies and the medical findings are still important, but Rhyme is usually trying to learn what traces passed between a person, an object and a place. Sometimes when the police are ready to close a case, one stray particle makes them rethink the whole investigation.

The books have enough technical information that it’s easy to follow Lincoln Rhyme’s reasoning, but they don’t read like dry forensic manuals. The author has said that he cuts technical material when it does not move the plot. The cases can still be disturbing, especially when the killer’s method is an actual part of the puzzle. For example, The Bone Collector and The Skin Collector contain some of the harsher material in the series, but the descriptions of injuries are not described for pages.

From The Bone Collector on Screen to the Books

Both the 1999 film The Bone Collector and the television series Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector were based on the first novel. However, the film changes a lot, including Amelia Sachs’s surname. Angelina Jolie’s character is now called Amelia Donaghy.

The television series keeps Amelia Sachs but the Bone Collector case becomes a bigger story. It doesn’t adapt the later novels, so if you watch the full series before reading the books, you won’t get past several books in the published order.

Start reading with The Bone Collector even after watching either adaptation. In the novel you see how Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs meet and start working together. The Coffin Dancer then continues with a new case to investigate.

More by Jeffery Deaver: The Lincoln Rhyme books are only one part of the author’s work. For the Kathryn Dance, Colter Shaw, Rune and John Pellam series, his standalone thrillers and complete short stories and collections, see Jeffery Deaver books in order.