AFTER THE RAIN

Ex-soldier, ex-cop Phil Broker (Vapor Trail, 2003, etc.) is hauled out of semiretirement to chase his wife and a McGuffin, both explosive.

Major Nina Price, lean, mean, and militant (she was, for instance, the first woman to lead a combat infantry unit under fire) is in a jam, and wouldn’t you know it, she needs hubby’s help to bail her out. The problem involves some suitcase-sized bombs with, gulp, inherent nuclear elements. There’s reason to believe they’ve been smuggled across the border from Canada into backwater Langton, North Dakota. Nina has the support of trusted colleagues, tested stalwarts of the elite Delta Force, but Broker is, after all, the nonpareil, the man with the perfected eye for “the subtleties in human and geographic landscape.” Considering the magnitude of the danger (think 9/11 exponentially), she feels she has no choice but to send out what amounts to an SOS. Why such reluctance? Because this warrior pair, though ever so hot for each other, is not what you’d call the yin and yang of domestic compatibility. Mutually, they irritate and antagonize; both would acknowledge that they had no business marrying. Having married, they shouldn’t, in Broker’s phrase, “have been allowed to breed.” Enter Kit, their seven-year-old-daughter, whom Nina has quite indefensibly shoved onto the chessboard in a gambit calculated to befuddle the bad guys. They’re certifiable, those bad guys, but they don’t befuddle worth a damn. Body bags fill, Nina gets herself kidnapped, and nuclear disaster approaches on little catastrophic feet. Never fear, though. Nina and Broker, with the help of their friends, rise to the occasion, cope with a contemporary Trojan horse among other booby-traps, and earn the thanks of a grateful nation.

Overplotted and underimagined. Logan’s sixth but far from his best.