In the Blood

December 1, 2021

In Barclay's Take Your Breath Away, Andrew Mason is suspected of murdering wife Brie after she disappears, and further complications arise when someone resembling her shows up at the couple's old address before vanishing again (100,000-copy first printing). First seen in Brown's 2021 New York Times best seller, Arctic Storm Rising, former U.S. Air Force officer Nick Flynn now faces a Countdown to Midnight, with Midnight the code name for a secret project between Russia and Iran involving a lethal new weapon (125,000-copy first printing). In Burke's Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, novelist Aaron Holland is guided by the ghost of his recently deceased daughter when his do-gooding efforts draw him into a shady crowd that includes a former Klansman, a not-so-saintly minister, some scary fake-evangelical bikers, and a murderer (100,000-copy first printing). In Carr's In the Blood, a Mossad operative known to former Navy SEAL James Reece is killed in a plane explosion (she herself had just completed a targeted assassination), but searching for the culprit might mean walking into a trap (200,000-copy first printing). In Horowitz's third James Bond outing, as yet Untitled, 007 is starting to question his role as the Cold War wears on but agrees to act as a double agent so that he can infiltrate a newly hatched Soviet intelligence organization (50,000-copy first printing). Unfolding 15 years after events in Iles's "Natchez Burning" trilogy, Southern Man reintroduces Penn Cage, back in action as shots fired at a Bienville music festival nearly kill his daughter, a militant Black group takes responsibility for the torching of antebellum mansions, and a close friend is shot to death by a county deputy (200,000-copy first printing). Her career stumbling, lawyer Nicole Muller gladly complies when she's asked by the exclusive women's professional group Panthera Leo to Please Join Us, but as author McKenzie soon reveals, membership comes at a price (60,000-copy first printing). Demoted from the elite Hawks police unit for being too keen on uncovering state corruption, Meyer's stalwart detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido await transfer from Cape Town to dull duty in Stellenbosch when an anonymous warning and a missing-student assignment reveal that The Dark Flood of corruption they knew was there is worse than they imagined. On a business trip with her new, much younger husband, Pavone's latest heroine, Ariel Price, can't enjoy her Two Nights in Lisbon; she awakens one morning to find her spouse missing and begins to realize that she hardly knows him (200,000-copy first printing). Edgar-nominated for The Impossible Fortress and also the editor behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Rekulak returns with Hidden Pictures, featuring a nanny whose five-year-old charge draws increasingly creepy and sophisticated pictures (shown in the text) hinting at a long-ago murder (250,000-copy first printing). A woman lies murdered, surrounded by Dark Objects that include the book How To Process a Murder by forensics expert Laughton Rees, who's of course immediately called to the scene; the latest from "Sanctus" author Toyne (50,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 18, 2022
Bestseller Carr’s fast-paced fifth Terminal List thriller (after 2021’s The Devil’s Hand) finds CIA operative James Reece, a former Navy SEAL, at his ranch in Flathead Valley, Mont., when he learns that a commercial airliner was shot down shortly after takeoff from Ouagadougou, Burkino Faso, killing everyone aboard. Reece recognizes one of the victims from a photo displayed on a TV news program: Aliya Galin, a Mossad assassin whose life Reece saved on a shared mission in Baghdad in 2008. Reece flies to Washington, D.C., where his boss, the director of the CIA’s Special Activities Center, tells him terrorist Nizar Kattan was responsible for bringing down the plane. Reece decides to seek revenge on Kattan for Aliya as well as for Freddy Strain, an old SEAL pal who recruited him to the CIA and was killed by Kattan years before. Meanwhile, Kattan is hunting Reece, hoping to fulfill a contract for Reece’s death assigned by the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. The action builds to a gripping final sniper vs. sniper shoot-out between Reece and Kattan. Military action fans will get their money’s worth. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM Partners.