The Twelfth Card Novel by Jeffery Deaver

Bestselling master of suspense Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme must save the life of a young girl by solving a truly “cold case”—one that’s 150 years old.

The Twelfth Card is a two-day cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of uptown Manhattan, as quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his protégée Amelia Sachs try to outguess a ruthless professional killer who is after Geneva Settle, a high school girl from Harlem…and it’s up to Lincoln and Amelia to figure out why.
The motive may have to do with a term paper that Geneva is writing about her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a former slave who was active in the early civil rights movement, but was arrested for theft and disgraced. What actually happened on that night in 1868 when Charles was arrested? What went on at the mysterious meetings he attended in Gallows Heights, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was a tense mix of wealthy financiers, political crooks, and working-class laborers and thugs? And what was the “secret” that tormented Charles’s every waking hour?
Deaver’s inimitable plotting keeps these stories—the past and the present—racing at a lightning-fast clip, with stunning revelations that strike at the very heart of the U.S. Constitution.