HEART TO HART

A crackerjack journalist and her super-smart dog investigate a case of corporate espionage in Reece’s debut thriller.

Investigative executive producer Amy Hart is a force to be reckoned with in Atlanta, where she leads a news team that develops newspaper, television, and radio content (“Her reporters, researchers, producers, and photographers are the most feared gang of muckrakers in the southeast”). They’ve just stumbled upon a case of corporate espionage involving a beautiful woman who’s sexually leveraging key staff to gain company secrets (Amy’s media-savvy team dubs the story “sexpionage”). It turns out the woman who’s blackmailing these employees is a former star model named Elise Nordstrom, and she’s working with a terrifying giant of a man known only as Blackmon. The case is much more complex than it initially appears, and Amy, along with lead reporter Tim Atwood and chief cameraman Cody Clark, may be endangering her life by intervening. In a strange quirk of fate, Amy’s pet dog, Jake, until recently a pretty normal canine, has become hyper-intelligent following a burst of lightning during a thunderstorm. Can Amy and her team— Jake included—report the story without ending up dead on the nightly news? Reece, a former broadcast journalist, constructs this tale with an observant (and somewhat cynical) eye for how media professionals think about crime: “The audience is going to love the Nightsnatch series,” Amy gushes about a recently completed story. “They’ll get to see real villains caught in the act. Some of them will be people they know for Christ’s sake…friends…neighbors…relatives. It’ll make a great lead-up to the sex-for-secrets package during sweeps.” The oddest element by far is the fact that the book is narrated by Jake, the dog, whose ability to communicate with Amy telepathically is neither played for levity nor particularly relevant to the larger plot. Readers who can roll with this unusual narrative approach—or who just love dogs—will enjoy this otherwise straightforward tale.

An offbeat but effective mystery thriller.