THE DAMASCUS THREAT

Name: THE DAMASCUS THREAT
Author: Matt Rees
ISBN: 978-1-62953-775-7

by Matt Rees ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

This series kickoff by the author of the Omar Yussef thrillers (The Fourth Assassin, 2010, etc.) keeps the action and the...

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In a race against the clock, an American special agent crisscrosses New York and travels to Syria to prevent a devastating chemical attack.

In Syria, the escape of a desperate man named Underwood is cut off by Lance, a sadistic thug. In Manhattan, Amy Weston is pursued by a hulking man in a hoodie. Though she reaches the office building that’s her destination, she’s brutally slain in an elevator. ICE Special Agent Dominic Verrazzano, Weston’s intended contact, manages to track down the killer, who declares, “I got the four-ten,” before jumping from a tall building to his death. Weston, a doctor specializing in chemical weapons, had recently been working in Syria. As Verrazzano seeks to identify the assassin in the hoodie and assemble the pieces of this puzzle, his movements are monitored by an ominous character known as The Janissary. Also in the mix is rugged Martin Chavez, who, after losing his legs in combat, gets recruited by his old pal Massie into the latter’s private security firm. Chavez’s caretaker and wife, Adela, does security for the U.N. Verrazzano’s tangled trail leads to Daryl Underwood and to Quanah Jones, Verrazzano’s old partner in a special assassin unit and the man who sent Weston to him. All roads lead to Syria for the climactic showdown.

This series kickoff by the author of the Omar Yussef thrillers (The Fourth Assassin, 2010, etc.) keeps the action and the close calls coming and tucks colorful characters into unexpected corners. Crackerjack entertainment, even if it mostly feels familiar.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62953-775-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crooked Lane

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | POLITICAL, MILITARY & TERRORISM

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

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COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)