The Stone Monkey

The Stone Monkey is a novel by crime writer Jeffery Deaver. First published in 2002, it is the fourth Deaver novel featuring the quadraplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme.

As the US Coast Guard moves to intercept a ship off the coast of New York, which had departed from St Petersburg carrying around 30 Chinese illegal immigrants, the leader of the ship, a notorious human smuggler and hitman named Ghost, decides to ignite a bomb, causing the ship to sink, as he escapes himself by means of a life-raft. A group of immigrants escape on a second life-raft, some of whom fall over within meters from the shore. One of them drowns, two are pursued and killed by Ghost, and a shot is fired by Ghost against another. The remaining ten, namely, the Chang and Wu families, who were dissidents and supporters of the 1989 riots in China, run into Chinatown of New York using a stolen van. Ghost meets with a local accomplice, but he drives off by himself, abandoning Ghost. Amelia Sachs, upon racing to the scene, finds a man with a gun-shot wound clinging to the rocks near the shore, and helps to rescue him. The man claims to be Dr John Sung, a well-known dissident and supporter of democracy. After being taken to the hospital, he requests asylum and is easily granted release pending the hearing.

At Lincoln Rhyme's apartment, where the interagency operation to intercept the ship was being coordinated, the team is approached by Sonny Li, one of the immigrants who fell off the raft, who is really an undercover police officer from Fuzhou, and who wishes to kill Ghost for personal reasons. Meanwhile, the Chang family is sheltered by a contact in Brooklyn, while the Wu family pays a Chinatown gang for protection. Ghost goes to the Uighur Community Center and hires three accomplices of the Uighur race to murder his unfaithful accomplice, as well as the leader of the aforementioned Chinatown gang. He tries to assault the apartment of the Wu family, but is ambushed by the FBI, INS, and NYPD. As it happens, the mother of Wu was sick with a disease common to China, and was intercepted at the hospital by Rhyme, who proceeded to arranged the ambush. However, an INS agent with a personal vendetta against Ghost fires too soon, alerting Ghost and allowing him escape, even though one accomplice is killed.