DEAD TIDE

Just because Lacie Wagner, unwinding on Nantucket before she resumes her stint as a D.C. news anchor, has found the body shouldn’t give her any special access to the investigation—at least, that’s what the hard-nosed ADA for Cape Cod and the islands thinks. Like it or not, though, Lacie’s in the thick of the case from the moment she notices the corpse’s unexplained burns. Soon, she’s talked her way into the post-mortem, gone on the air with the Boston NBC affiliate, and traced the drowned Jane Doe to a Special Ops unit so secret that neither Congress nor the President knows about it. She’s also attracted the attention of charming, sociopathic businessman Justin Vale, who’s cultivated her acquaintance just long enough to bed her and vanish in a puff of smoke. Throughout the first half of this fleet, unnerving thriller, Kadow, taking a leaf from Patricia Cornwell’s forensics but pushing into far uglier territory outside the lab, keeps spinning out mysteries so brilliantly that it hardly matters that the killer’s been revealed. Only when Lacie hooks up with retired investigator Nick St. James, who’s as masculine and windy as Travis McGee at his worst, do things settle into a more predictable groove—all action, all the time, with a retrospective body count that shoots higher than Old Faithful, just in case you don’t care enough about the prospective victims already threatened with a watery grave.

As in Lacie’s hardcover debut (Burnout, 1999), a potent first half fizzles in a shower of sparks. But nobody will stop reading halfway through.