TERROR RED

It’s Boston under attack in this double-author debut action-thriller, with the Muslim Brotherhood hoping to go one better than al-Qaida.

Although the authors label the protagonists with nearly identical first names, this one’s no roman à clef. Retired special ops colonel David Gibson operates a security company. Christina Marchetti is a political consultant to "I want to be President" Sen. Brian Kerrigan from Massachusetts. It’s post-Christmas, and there’s a flight from Logan Airport to D.C. Gibson’s mother has a seat, and Marchetti’s eager to load her high-maintenance sister. Then the aircraft is hijacked while it sits at runway’s end. Gibson and Marchetti meet when security officials question people who have connections to the flight’s passengers. It's then that Marchetti attaches herself to Gibson, since "Woman’s intuition?....You just look like you’d know these kinds of things." And the fireworks start! Gibson knows people: Fuller, a state police major, who becomes the go-to source for information; and Tony, intelligence wizard. Marchetti knows street cops and politicians. She talks her way through roadblocks and has her senator help dispatch a SEAL team to locate a nonresponsive LNG vessel in Boston Harbor. The pair survive tunnel explosions—even part of the billion-dollar Big Dig goes bang—and ambushes and escape being labeled murderers as they shoot Brotherhood bad guys. Told in alternating points of view in chapters sometimes shorter than a page, this is a take-no-breath–or-prisoners narrative.

This one suits the big screen. And it has sequel written all over it.