Killer View

September 1, 2021

Back when he was the junior member of a CIA action team (and known as Sierra Six), Court Gentry, a.k.a. the Gray Man, helped messily eliminate a terrorist leader who now appears to be very much alive; next in Greaney's No. 1 New York Times best-selling series. In Hood's Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Transgression, the continuation of a recently launched series, Adam Hayes is asked by his CIA Black Ops program to set up a safe house and is the only survivor when the mission is blown. Dedicated to helping others after having escaped from a shadowy black box program aimed at creating assassins, Evan Smoak, a.k.a. Orphan X, has a new mission in Hurwitz's Dark Horse: rescue the kidnapped daughter of Texas drug overlord Aragon Urrea (200,000-copy first printing). In Jance's Nothing To Lose, retired police detective Beaumont is asked for help by the son of his former partner Sue Danielson, who was murdered years ago by her raging ex-husband. Johansen gives us a big, new Killer View of Jessie Mercado, a Southern California private investigator who surfaces regularly in the "Kendra Michaels" series he writes with his mother, Iris Johansen. In the Edgar Award-winning Kanon's Cold War Berlin-set The Berlin Exchange, two U.S. students and an MI5 operative are being quietly traded far from Checkpoint Charlie for physicist Martin Keller, who had been imprisoned in the UK and now wants to see his ex-wife and son--but what do the East Germans want from him? (125,000-copy first printing). Wending their way through City of the Dead, Kellerman stalwarts Alex Delaware and his buddy, Det. Milo Sturgis, discover a naked, bled-out young man in the streets and a trail of blood leading to the nearby home of sliced-up Cordelia Gannett, an internet influencer Alex knows. Multi-award-winning Northern Irish writer McKinty follows up the New York Times best-selling, Paramount Pictures-ready The Chain with The Chase, so obviously of interest that we won't even worry about the absence of plot details (150,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Mezrich's The Midnight Ride, fresh-from-prison Nick Patterson sneaks into a hotel room on an obligatory job to find his fence dead and scared-witless MIT student Hailey Gordon hiding out after having been caught counting cards; added to this mix is a U.S. history professor's discovery of an unsettling secret about the Revolutionary War (75,000-copy first printing). A domestic-thrills author with 20 Sunday Times best sellers to her name, Parks limns the unaccountable disappearance of two women--contented wife and stepmother Leigh and wealthy, newly married Kai--in cases that shouldn't be linked but seem to be in Both of You (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).

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December 20, 2021
In this propulsive series spinoff from bestseller Johansen (the Kendra Michaels series), PI Jessie Mercado, Kendra’s friend and occasional colleague, takes center stage. Michaels, “a San Diego music therapist whose powers of observation made her a go-to consultant in several high-profile law enforcement investigations,” introduces Jessie to a new client, Owen Blake, the co-owner of an incarceration consultancy, which handles financial and personal needs for people who are serving prison sentences. Blake’s partner, Carl Ferris, has disappeared, and he wants Jessie to find him. Though she suspects that Blake may be hiding something, she nonetheless agrees to take his case. She’s assisted by her new boyfriend, “the hottest actor on the planet,” who decides to put the skills he has honed working on Marvel Superhero flicks to good use. Kendra also lends a hand. When the first person Jessie questions about Ferris is murdered and she too is attacked, she realizes there’s much more at stake than a missing person. Relentless action and dastardly villains keep the pages turning. Johansen, who usually collaborates with mother Iris Johansen, delivers the goods. Agents: Andrea Cirillo and Rebecca Scherer, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Feb.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly noted that this book was part of an existing series.

January 1, 2022
When CIA observational and analytical wizard Kendra Michaels refers a client to her pal, private investigator Jessie Mercado, it's far from a typical missing person case. The vanished individual is Carl Ferris, partner with Owen Blake in a firm that provides unique services for those about to be imprisoned, everything from arranging physical protection on the inside to managing the minutiae of their lives on the outside. Although Jessie would prefer to work solo, her new friends-with-benefits relationship with movie superstar Jake Brice gives her some added muscle and perspective. Ricocheting from Ventura Beach to the desert east of L.A., their sleuthing plunges them deep into the world of corporate finance and for-profit prisons, where a well-connected executive employs deadly means to protect her secrets. As a key secondary player in the Kendra Michaels series, Jessie Mercado has been steadily coming into her own. Physically unstoppable, intellectually nimble, and emotionally grounded, Jessie deserves to carry the action in what promises to be a breakout direction for the prolific Johansen thriller franchise.

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