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RULES OF WAR

An action-packed tale of deep-state double crossings and the elite soldiers charged with ensuring American interests.

An American Special Forces officer teams with a Venezuelan counterintelligence agent to combat a nebulous international organization.

Bringing his experiences as a former Marine officer, Betley (Field of Valor, 2018, etc.) returns with his serial character, former Marine Force Recon veteran and apex soldier Logan West. In this outing, Chief Inspector Santiago Rojas of Bolivarian National Intelligence is charged with locating West, with the promise of medical treatment for his daughter if he succeeds. It doesn’t take long for Rojas to find Logan, along with former CIA special operator Cole Matthews, at a Bahamian resort, on a mission to find the traitorous American vice president. Nor does it take long for the Glock pistols to be drawn, the bone-crushing unarmed combat to commence, and the edged weapons to find a home in human flesh. Basically, it appears that violence follows Logan wherever he goes, and he is more than ready to greet it. However, with a child of his own on the way, Logan quickly sees the nobility in Santiago’s actions and accompanies him back to Venezuela, where Logan learns that high-ranking Venezuelan and Russian officials are helping the missing veep. Logan puts aside any concerns about the Venezuelan human rights record to help Santiago save his daughter and to punish the American defector and anyone helping him. Some of the connections in this account of international intrigue appear somewhat loose, but there is a surplus of gunplay and military tactics to keep the pages turning for fans.

An action-packed tale of deep-state double crossings and the elite soldiers charged with ensuring American interests.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-6202-2

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria

Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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PRETTY GIRLS

Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...

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Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.

The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.

Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.

Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015

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