The Broken Window by Jeffrey Deaver

This book is frightening about how easy it would be to destroy someone's life with identity theft or identity destruction.

Detective Sach's and Rhyme are working on a case when Rhyme gets a call about his cousin who is sitting in jail for a murder he swears he didn't commit.  The evidence is overwhelming though, blood and other evidence are found at his house.  Rhyme starts looking into it and finds out that after the murder someone called the police and reported it.  Ryhmes team find a very disturbing pattern where other murders have occurred with a call to police to reporting the murders and incredible evidence is then found at the suspects house.  When the murderer finds out who is after him, he turns turns his efforts to Rhymes team and creates a data nightmare for all of them. 

Why would someone frame Rhyme's cousin for a murder and possibly do it on other murders?  More importantly if that is happening, how on earth could it be? 

It is clear that Deaver takes pleasure in surprising the reader.  I enjoy it.  I thought I had it at one point, I knew who the murderer was just to be foiled once again.  The suspense at the end was killing me.  At least I had a chance in the book and I wasn't hanging by a thread from the first chapter like before. 

Did you know that there is a "Broken Window Theory" that if you fix or concentrate on the small details the big things will basically take care of themselves.  In the context of this book it also means focusing on the small details will lead to solving the big crime. 

There are companies in the world that collect and distribute data for a variety of reasons.  They are called data-mining companies.  It is scary how much data they have on people and it's scary how the data makes people act without having any actual facts to support the data.  I know that I have suffered because of credit companies showing data on me that isn't right but because of it banks think I'm a risk when all the other evidence shows that I am not a risk.  People are putting all their faith in what a data company reports instead of using their heads to make an informed decision.  We, the people, are often powerless to defend ourselves.  If you would like to do more research go to:  EPIC.org, http://www.gilc.org/, http://www.indefenseoffreedom.org/, http://ifea.net/, http://www.privacy.org/ or http://www.eff.org/.  There is also another book on the subject: No Place to Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Jr.