Secrets to the Grave, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95)

Teacher-turned-child protector Anne Leone has barely recovered from her near murder when she’s called in to help on another case: a 4-year-old is found barely alive, draped over her mother’s body. The only clue is a 911 call the child made in which she said “My daddy hurt my mommy.”

Should be cut and dried, except that many men in mommy’s life were called “daddy.” The local sheriff needs help, and turns to Anne’s husband, Vince, an FBI profiler. Soon the victim’s best friend goes missing, the victim’s body parts are mailed to another friend, and the investigators learn that there are as many mysteries surrounding the victim’s true identity as there are surrounding her death.

I wish Tami Hoag would move on from the Leones. I just don’t like them. They don’t seem to fit together very well, so their dialogue is not realistic. I find Anne to be particularly unlikable. She wants to help children, which is admirable; yet she is inconsistent and does not always seem to have the child’s best interest at heart. She fought to keep a troubled child out of a juvenile facility after he stabbed a classmate, and as a result, he was housed the county mental hospital—not the best solution, in my opinion.  Anne visited him for a while, but dropped him when the 4-year-old came into her life. (Anne has lots of excuses for why she could no longer visit the boy, but I’m not buying. He was a 12-year-old surly troublemaker, and she replaced him with a 4-year-old little princess. I’d probably act out, too, which is just what the older child did, with terrible results.)

It also troubled me that Anne and Vince were allowed to take the 4-year-old home without already being approved foster parents. Perhaps the state of California, where the book takes place, is okay with well-intentioned folks stepping up to take care of children in situations like this; I’d feel a whole lot better if the parents had to undergo some screening and training in fostering first. Particularly since Vince is the first to admit that he was a lousy father to his own kids.

I’m not going to read another Tami Hoag mystery if these characters are in it.  The mystery isn’t compelling enough, there are far too many red herrings, and the romance—something Hoag used to excel at—is tepid at best.

Last Minute Gift Suggestions for Mystery Lovers

Hear that sound? It’s the clock ticking down the days, hours, and minutes until Christmas morning! Don’t despair—you already know what to get the mystery lovers on your list! There are lots of good books out, some with the ink barely dry. So print out this list, head for the bookstore, and while you’re there, buy yourself a little something, too!

Dead or Alive, by Tom Clancy (Putnam; $28.95) Hot off the press, this huge thriller brings together Jack Ryan and the rest of the Clancy crew to fight a sadistic killer known as the Emir who is intent on destroying the US.

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré (Viking; $27.95): A young vacationing English couple’s tennis game with a Russian money launderer puts them in the middle of a tug-of-war between the Russian mafia, the City of London, and the competing arms of the British Secret Service.

Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam; $27.95): Kay Scarpetta’s training in virtual autopsies come in handy when a young man drops dead near her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with befuddling internal injuries.

Secrets to the Grave, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95): When a young mother is murdered, the cops in a small California town ask a child advocate to help with the victim’s four-year old child, but her work soon puts her and the child in the path of the killer.

Hollywood Hills, by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown; $26.99: LAPD “Hollywood Nate” Weiss’ stint keeping an eye on the Hollywood Hills mansion of a wealthy widow puts him at odds with her ex-con butler and conniving art dealer.

Christmas Mourning, by Margaret Maron (Grand Central Publishing; $25.99): Judge Deborah Knott and her husband, Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant put their dreams of a homey Christmas on hold when a horrific accident turns out to be not an accident.

What the Night Knows, by Dean Koontz (Random House; $28.00) A series of murders seem to mirror killings some years before, and the homicide cop on the case suspects his own family might be next.

In Too Deep, by Jayne Ann Krentz (Putnam; $25.95): An investigator of the paranormal and his new assistant with powers of intuition must battle the dark energy of the secret powers afoot in their small California town.

And now, two favorite authors of mine whose books were disappointing:  

Worth Dying For, by Lee Child (Delacorte Press; $28): As Jack Reacher passes through a small town in Nebraska, he crosses paths with the Duncans, a villainous family with a deadly secret. The book is almost a parody of Childs’ usual Reacher mysteries, with a ludicrous body count, numerous mountainous Cornhusker football players overcome by our middle-aged hero, and one ridiculous scene of Reacher setting his own badly broken nose.

Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard (Morrow; $26.99): This book is, quite simply, a mess.  The plot, such as it is, has a documentary filmmaker trying to film Somali pirates stumbling upon a plot to blow up a tanker carrying liquid natural gas. Instead of Leonard’s usual brilliant dialogue, the conversations in this one are nearly incomprehensible, and none of the characters are at all memorable. I love Elmore Leonard, but this book was a stinker.

The Hilliker Curse, by James Ellroy (Knopf; $24.95)

I don’t often read memoirs. But I picked up Ellroy’s latest because I have always been interested in his backstory. Briefly, his mother was murdered in the late 50s, and the crime was never solved. As an adult, he hired a homicide cop to try to solve the case, but he never found the killer. I’ve also enjoyed some of his books, particularly The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential.  But some of his other books were pretentious and nearly unintelligible. Those books, along with The Hilliker Curse’s subtitle of My Pursuit of Women, should have been a warning to proceed carefully. But nothing, nothing could have prepared me for the total crazy self-absorption that is this book. 

The plot, in short, is this: Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was about 8 years old. He lived with his mother, Jean Hilliker, who started drinking and sleeping around fairly openly. Jean tells her little boy that his father has been peeping in their windows, watching her with other men.  The younger Ellroy starts peeping in his neighborhood, graduating to breaking and entering the homes of wealthy young women. Eventually, Jean Hilliker asks the now teenaged James if he’d rather live with his father, and hits him when he says yes. He curses her, and she was murdered three months later, “at the apex of my hatred and equally burning lust.”

And so begins a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs, and bottoming-out that, amazingly, didn’t kill him. Instead, he became a writer, achieving no small amount of success. Had that been the end of the story, it would have been a Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday special. But the hook here is Ellroy is obsessed with absolutely everything: a woman named Marcia Sidwell who spoke kindly to him in a laundromat back in 1973; Beethoven; Anne Sofie von Otter; his salivary glands. He works like a dervish, he cuts his skin to release the cancer that isn’t there, he breaks down. 

The overriding element here is sex, rooted in his feelings for his mama.  “Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story,” he writes.  “It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of malediction. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality pre-shaped The Curse and preordained the resolution as my overweening desire for women.” The question for me was why any woman, including those he married, returned this desire. He just sounds like a guy with an interesting history who has turned into a dreadful bore.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t like his writing style: I do. He calls it “loony language loops,” and I can’t find a better way to describe it. It’s rhythmic and staccato and beautiful in its own idiosyncratic way. I’m not sure, though, that, having read this memoir, I’ll ever be able to read another of his novels without feeling a vague ickiness.

 

The Last Talk with Lola Faye, by Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25)

Over the past 20+ years that I've been reviewing mysteries, there is one writer who I would put near the top of the list of the all time best mystery writers. That writer is Thomas H. Cook. Although he's won awards from his peers (nominated for an Edgar seven times, won once for best novel), he hasn't received the popular attention he deserves. The reason may be that his books are not page turners, filled with gratuitous violence, police procedure, and steamy sex. Indeed, his books work best if you read them slowly, deliberately relishing the language that he uses and pausing frequently to try to enjoy the skill with which he builds up to his stories' final "reveal."

The Last Talk with Lola Faye is a perfect example. Luke Page, once the academic shining star of Glenville, Alabama, never lived up to his early promise.  A historian, he'd written books in which he'd "hoped to portray the physical feel of American history, its tactile core. . .mine would be histories with a heartbeat--palpable, alive, histories with true feeling." His books, however, never conveyed this sense of life. He describes writing each book as "beginning with a passionate concept, then watching as it shrank to a bloodless monograph." He knows now that he probably will never write the books he intended to write, and has become, as his estranged wife described, "a strangely shriveled thing."

Invited to a St. Louis museum to discuss his latest book, Luke is startled to see Lola Faye Gilroy in the audience.  Now a faded, middle aged woman looking a little off, Lola Faye bears little resemblance to the spirited young woman whose jealous husband had murdered Luke's father so many years earlier.

"Are you proud of what you did?" she asks Luke, causing "a quiver of anxiety" to rush through him. Although she explained that she meant getting a fancy education and leaving Glenville, his reaction is a clue that there is much more to her question than what is obvious on the surface.

Luke and Lola Faye meet for a drink, and over the next few hours--and the rest of the book--they talk about the past: what led up to her husband murdering Luke's father, and the tragic events that followed that tragic event. The story unfolds through Luke and Lola Faye comparing notes and filling in information that one or the other did not know at the time. When their conversation and Luke's memories uncovered the whole sad and chilling story, I was in awe of Cook's ability to weave it together so seamlessly.

"'It's Southern gothic, that's for sure,'" Luke tells Lola Faye.'"Families with dark secrets. The war between fathers and sons. Selfishness. Greed. Violence. The debts of the past. Old bills too high to pay, but which keep coming in.'" With Luke's words, Thomas H. Cook neatly sums up his incredible body of work. I simply can't get enough of his books.

The Reversal, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown; $27.99)

A few books back, Detective Harry Bosch and defense attorney Mickey Haller learned they were half brothers. In Michael Connelly's latest, the two join forces to re-secure the conviction of a man who murdered a young girl some 25 years earlier.

Tests on the child's clothing have shown that the DNA did not come from Jason Jessup, the man convicted of her murder. The court has released him pending a retrial, and the District Attorney has asked Mickey Haller to serve as a special prosecutor. Haller agrees, upon the condition that he can pick his own team. He chooses his ex-wife, Maggie McPherson as his second chair, and Bosch as his investigator.

Jessup is a total creep, and the three know he's guilty. But he's managed to get public sentiment on his side, and there is strong support for letting him go. Bosch has the police department follow Jessup to make see what he's up to, and the case turns personal when he shows up outside of Bosch's house, with the detective's teenaged daughter inside.

Haller, Bosch, and "Maggie McFierce" make a great team, and it was fun to see them work on the same side of the courtroom. As always, Connelly's plotting and pacing are superb. 

Blind Man's Alley, by Justin Peacock (Doubleday; $26.95)

When an accident at New York's Aurora Tower condo kills three workers, attorney Duncan Riley's workload becomes almost exclusively devoted to defending Roth Properties, the developer. The only other case on Duncan's plate is a pro bono case defending Rafael Nazario, a young guy from a public housing project, who, along with his grandmother, is about to be evicted because of a trumped up marijuana case.

Just as the eviction case is about to be dropped, someone murders the security guard who made the accusation against Rafael. A witness claims to have seen Rafael running from the murder, and he's immediately arrested. When Duncan learns that the security guard was employed by the firm that provides security for the Aurora Tower condo project, he expects to be pulled off the murder due to a conflict of interest. So he's perplexed when his boss tells him to defend Nazario on the murder charge, but to get a quick plea. 

Duncan believes in his client's innocence, and wants to find out why Rafael is being framed.  Meanwhile, a newspaper reporter investigating the Aurora Tower accident learns that Roth Properties is trying to force evictions from the public housing project so they can turn it into higher-rent apartments. Her investigation and Duncan's proceed on parallel tracks until finally the two compare notes and work together to expose the Roths' corruption.

Justin Peacock's believable legal thriller takes unscrupulous developers, unprincipled lawyers, and blood-thirsty security consultants and weaves them together into an exciting, terrific whole. I really enjoyed this book. 

The Search, by Nora Roberts (Putnam; $26.95) and Whiplash, by Catherine Coulter (Putnam; $26.95)

I decided to review these two romantic mysteries together, since if you like one you'll like both. (And conversely, if you think one is too sappy, stay away from the other.)

Let's start with Nora Roberts, since she is, of course, the genre queen. Fiona Bristow has made a wonderful life for herself on Orcas Island, in the Pacific Northwest. She trains dogs for a living and, with her own three labs, volunteers on search-and-rescue missions. But life wasn't always so idyllic. Several years back, she was attacked by a serial killer who already had a long track record of killing his victims. Fiona managed to escape, and the killer was captured. Although he's behind bars, the killings have resumed. Someone, it seems, has picked up where the killer left off. Soon it becomes clear that Fiona is the unfinished business, and the new killer wants to finish what his mentor started.

Meanwhile, a handsome stranger has moved to the island. Brooding artist Simon Doyle has an incorrigible puppy that needs training fast. Imagine the reader's surprise when Simon and Fiona fall in love! Who would have ever guessed? (Well, I did, actually. But I've been doing this kind of work for a while!)

There's a reason why Nora Roberts is so wildly popular--she can somehow make a hackneyed theme seem fresh. (Boy meets girl, then conflict drives them apart, then they live happily ever after.) Pick up any of her books and you won't be disappointed; this one is particularly down-to-earth and exciting.

Catherine Coulter's latest wasn't quite as satisfying. Ballet teacher/sleuth Erin Pulasky's latest assignment is to obtain evidence that a drug company has deliberately caused a shortage of their cheaper medicine in order to force cancer patients to take a more expensive (i.e. lucrative) drug. She breaks in to steal documents and makes a clean getaway. In an amazing coincidence, a company official is murdered at roughly the same time and location. The police figure that whoever broke in must have either murdered the guy or seen who did it.

And here's where it gets sort of silly. One of Erin's ballet students has a father who is an FBI agent. He asks Erin, whom he hardly knows, to babysit his daughter for several days while he's out working the case of the murdered drug exec. He then compounds the problem by inviting the other agents on the case over to her house, where they proceed to discuss the case in front of her. One of the agents even invites her along when she's interviewing a witness. Although the mystery itself was sound, the absurdity of the agents' behavior ruined the book for me.

End-of-Summer Wrap-Up

Sorry for all you mystery fans who have wondered where I've been. No, I've not been kidnapped: I was actually on vacation for a while. And yes, even on vacation, I still read mysteries! Because what's the alternative? Non-fiction? Like that's gonna happen!

In my next several blogs, I'll review the books I've read while I was gone. In the meantime, my stack of books to read has grown higher, and some of the books are getting a little ripe. So I'm going to clear out the stack with these short blurbs about the books that look the most interesting.

Crossfire, by Dick Francis and Felix Francis (Putnam; $26.95):  Former jockey Dick Francis, who died earlier this year at the age of 89, left behind a legacy of wonderful mysteries set in the world of horse racing. His latest, written with his son, focuses on a soldier injured in Afghanistan. When Captain Tom Forsyth returns to England to help out on his mother's horse farm, he soon learns that his mother is being blackmailed. While learning to walk with a prosthesis, he must figure out which of his abrasive mother's many enemies are behind the threats before the focus switches to him.

Cure, by Robin Cook (Putnam; $26.95): NYC medical examiner Laurie Montgomery's first case after taking leave to deal with her son's serious illness puts her between organized crime and two nascent biotech firms.

Ice Cold, by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine Books; $26): Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli learns that medical examiner Maura Isles and some friends have met a terrible fate when their SUV became stranded on a remote Wyoming mountain near the freaky town of Kingdom Come. Spoiler alert: since Rizzoli & Isles is now a series on TNT, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Isles may actually be okay.

Procession of the Dead, by Darren Shan (Grand Central Publishing; $19.99): YA novelist Shan, whose books fly off the shelves at the middle school library where I work, branched out into adult fiction with this strange little book. Capac Raimi can't remember anything from the time before he came to the City, a brutal, lawless place run by the ruthless Cardinal. As the Cardinal's protege, Capac becomes more and more bloodthirsty himself, while trying to understand why friends disappear as if they've never existed. I'm not one for this alternative universe, fantasy stuff, but as such books go, it was a decent summer read, but definitely not for kids.

Live to Tell, by Lisa Gardner (Bantam; $26): Three women facing dark secrets from their past must face threats that hit close to home.

Frankenstein: Lost Souls, by Dean Koontz (Bantam; $27):  Victor Leben, the creature formerly known as Frankenstein, is on a quest to populate a brave new world of superhumans using stem cells, silicon circuitry, and nanotechnology.

The Cobra, by Frederick Forsyth (Putnam; $26.95): Paul Devereaux, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division teams up with Army hero Cal Dexter to beat the cocaine industry using any means possible.

In Harm's Way, by Ridley Pearson (Putnam; $25.95):  Something's up in Sun Valley, Idaho, and sheriff Walt Fleming's not at all sure what's going on. A violent former football player has been seen in the area. A woman he's fond of might have killed a guy, or maybe the killer was a damaged young woman whom everyone in the community wants to protect. Some rich playboys are causing trouble, and a marauding bear is loose, as well. Fleming's chances of untangling the mess become easier when Seattle homicide detective Lou Boldt comes to town to help.

Six Graves to Munich, by Mario Puzo, writing as Mario Cleri (New American Library; $14):  As a captured intelligence officer in World War II, Michael Rogan and his family were subjected to indescribable horror. Now he wants to find and punish those responsible. Puzo wrote this book in 1967, two years before The Godfather, but the book quickly went out of print. According to the press packet, the book was "found by Puzo's longtime Polish publisher, Albatros, and is coming back into print." One wonders why it took so long for the publisher to "find" the book and capitalize upon Puzo's success. It must have been really, really lost.

The Other Side of the Door, by Nicci French (Minotaur Books; $25.99): When a friend is murdered, a music teacher who had hoped to spend the summer making music with friends finds a little more drama than she'd expected.

Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf; $26.95)

I think I must have the summertime blues.  I just haven't found much to love about the season's new books. Case in point is Carl Hiaasen's latest.  Normally, I find Hiaasen to be laugh-out-loud fun. This time, I just found his characters to be tiresome.

The problem might be his subject matter. Is there anything more boring than a no-talent pop-culture figure's journey of self-destruction? The train wreck here is 22-year-old Cherry Pye (nee Cheryl Bunterman), who is trying hard to rekindle the success she found at age 15 with her breakout album "Touch Me Like You Mean It" on Jailbait Records. Unfortunately, Cherry (who insists that she now wants to be called Cherish) has spiraled into a sordid frenzy for alcohol and any drug she can lay her hands on. This behavior, naturally, would drive away the tweens who currently love her, so her peeps have hired a look-alike actress, Ann Delusia, to serve as her double whenever the real Cherry Pye is too messed up to be seen in public.

When a desperate paparazzo named Bang Abbott kidnaps Ann--thinking it's Cherry--the pop star's parasitic people face a dilemma. After all, it wasn't even Cherry who was kidnapped. Bang ups the ante by threatening to release some compromising pictures of Ann posing as Cherry, and it's fun to watch everyone try to turn the situation to their own avaricious advantage.

The mayhem is increased by the re-introduction of some favorite characters from previous books. Skink, the former governor of Florida who makes routine appearances in Hiaasen's books, meets Ann and falls into paternal love with her, going so far as to clean up his act and put on a Hermes shirt and a suit by Ermenegilo Zegna. Chemo, the walking dermatology-disaster from Skin Tight who, after his arm was bitten off by a barracuda, had it replaced by a weed whacker, serves as Cherry's bodyguard.  I suspect the overly-botoxed publicists who underwent surgery to become identical twins may have made an appearance in a previous book as well.

As with many of Hiaasen's books, the normal, honorable character--in this case, Ann--is truly heroic, able to double-cross the greedy low-lifes that add the color. But the story has, as its root, Cherry Pye's destruction from her addiction to pills and alcohol. Call me a prude, but I find the real-life behavior of Brittany, Lindsay and Paris to be pathetic and tragic, rather than funny.  Hiaasen's books usually focus on retribution descending on those who are destroying the Everglades. That is a subject I can care about a lot more than I care about flash-in-the-pan rock stars killing themselves with drugs while their dysfunctional parents and hangers-on look the other way. 

Dead Line, by Stella Rimington (Knopf; $25.95)

Stella Rimington's latest shows that she's no flash in the pan. The former head of Britain's MI5 turned to writing when she retired. Her suspenseful plots are made all the more realistic by her insider's knowledge of spycraft.

With her boss out of commission nursing his dying wife, MI5 agent Liz Carlyle is charged with the daunting task of thwarting a plot by Syrian malcontents intent on disrupting a peace conference at a Scottish golf resort. The stakes are all the higher when it is announced that both the British prime minister and the US president will attend. As if she didn't already have her hands full, a former colleague asks Liz to investigate a charming guy who is paying unusual attention to the colleague's naive and wealthy mother-in-law.  This nail-biter has it all: spy vs. spy, gold-diggers preying on lonely women, and foreign agents snaring their quarry in an old fashioned "honey trap." This is Rimington's fourth spy thriller, and it's a doozy--as good, if not better, than her previous three.

In the Name of Honor, by Richard North Patterson (Henry Holt; $26)

It's about time! After several misfires, Richard North Patterson has written a book that equals or betters anything he's written before. In the Name of Honor has it all: fascinating, unpredictable characters; gripping courtroom drama; and a crackerjack twist that adds complexity and moral conflict to what was already a multi-layered plot.

Here's the back story. Captain Paul Terry of the Army's JAG Corps is two months from starting a lucrative new job with a civilian law firm when he's assigned to be defense counsel on a sticky case: an Army lieutenant accused of shooting his former commanding officer. The relationships are very confusing, so stay with me here: We've got two Army families, the McCarrans and the Gallaghers. The dads are best friends at West Point, but only Anthony McCarran comes back from Viet Nam alive. His wife dies young. So the Gallaghers and McCarrans are, for all intents and purposes, one family. Okay, fast forward. Anthony McCarran is now a general, in line to be named chairman of the joint chiefs. Brian McCarran has followed the family tradition of joining the Army, while his sister Meg is a civilian attorney. Their quasi-sister, Kate Gallagher, is married to Captain Joe D'Abruzzo, who is also'coincidentally (and conveniently for the plot) Brian's commanding officer in Iraq. McCarran and D'Abruzzo return to the states, and each is a changed man. D'Abruzzo has become violent and beats Kate Gallagher, even to the extent of holding a gun to her head. She asks Brian McCarran for help. He removes the gun from the D'Abruzzo house. D'Abruzzo realizes the gun is missing, goes to Brian McCarran's apartment, looks like he's going to attack, and Brian McCarran shoots him dead.   

And that's when the story begins. Captain Terry is charged with trying to get Brian McCarran off. Self-defense is a tough sell, since D'Abruzzo was shot in the back. Terry suspects that something happened in Iraq that changed both McCarran and D'Abruzzo and might have influenced the shooting. McCarran won't talk about his experiences, nor is he particularly forthcoming about other details that Terry needs to know in order to properly defend him. Working closely with Meg McCarran, Terry probes deeper and deeper until he finally realizes that the family secrets and shifting dynamics of the intertwined McCarran and Gallagher families form a force larger than he can surmount. 

The story is told primarily through dialogue and courtroom testimony, and the real-time revelations add to the suspense. In some of his previous books, Patterson has spent as much time on the soap box as on the plot. There's none of that in this book: it's just a terrific, perfectly crafted courtroom thriller.

The Lion, by Nelson DeMille (Grand Central Publishing; $27.99)

Some of Nelson DeMille's books are so great that I despair when I read the last page; others are so annoying that I rue the day I opened them. The Gold Coast is an example of the former, while its sequel, The Gate House, is a prime example of the latter.

His latest just manages to skirt the line. John Corey, his recurring character, can't resist being the juvenile cut-up he was when I first encountered him in Plum Island (perhaps my favorite of DeMille's books).  Fortunately, the plot is almost good enough that one can skip Corey's sophomoric one-liners and still enjoy the story.

Former NYPD detective Corey and his wife, FBI agent Kate Mayfield, both work for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, a joint operation between the two agencies. They met when they partnered up in The Lion's Game, in which they chased Libyan terrorist Asad Khalil in his murderous trail across the country.  Khalil's plan was to kill the pilots responsible for the bombs that took out his family many years ago. He disappeared before he finished, but Corey always knew he'd be back.

It is soon evident that Corey and Mayfield are at the top of Khalil's to-do list. But they are not alone. Khalil does not let human emotions get in the way of his jihad. Soon bodies begin turning up, many of which belonged to fellow Muslims who Khalil killed after they helped him with the logistics of his latest terrorist activities. Corey and Mayfield believe that those in the Middle East who financed Khalil's personal vengeance would only do so if he agreed to also commit a 9/11 type atrocity. The question is whether the agents can find the killer before he's able to pull off a horrifying event. The NYPD and FBI want to capture and question the killer, but Corey just wants to kill him.

The plot is very tense, but suffers when a main character takes an unnecessary risk that the reader knows will be disastrous. (You know how you laugh at the stupidity of the teenage babysitter in a slasher film who goes into the basement to investigate a noise? I laughed at this character's similar stupidity. It's that unbelievable.)  Ultimately, the book made me angry. I'm a major fan of DeMille, but my loyalty is waning. He is so incredibly talented, and his early books were so enjoyable, that it's a tragic waste that he's ruined his later books by his characters' off-putting immaturity.  One only hopes that someday he'll realize how much better his books would be without the quips.