LEAVE NO TRACE

The bombing of Liberty Island is only the beginning.

As the Logan family heads into the Statue of Liberty, teenage son Danny breaks away from the entrance line to shoot some phone video of an obsolete boat, an M1-44 sitting incongruously in the harbor. Suddenly there’s an explosion behind him, and Danny sees “a landscape of bodies.” Michael Walker, of the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, is called up from his post at Shenandoah National Park and teamed with New York–based FBI Special Agent Gina Delgado to investigate. As an observant eyewitness with a camera, Danny becomes a target, but Michael shepherds him to safety after winning a shootout with a would-be assassin. At the center of the nefarious plot is supervillain Abel Rathman, presumed dead in a helicopter crash two years ago but captured very much alive on Danny’s video recording. While Mike and Gina are assembling the puzzle pieces surrounding the explosion, terrorist threats spring up like weeds all across the country, from Independence Hall to Mount Rainier to more than half a dozen states in between. Frequent jumps of location in super-short chapters amp up the excitement in Landau’s hyperkinetic, if sometimes hyperbolic, thriller. Each of the 98 chapters in this first entry in the National Parks Thriller series opens with an interesting tidbit relevant to the given chapter, often about the parks. Did you know that Utah’s Zion National Park spreads over three counties?

A lively, if generic, terrorism thriller with a trivia bonus.