Just to give you an update on the release dates for the newest additions to the series that I have reviewed.
Soon to be Released
Eliot Peper – Bandwidth
Expected Release Date 5/1/18
A rising star at a preeminent political lobbying firm, Dag Calhoun represents the world’s most powerful technology and energy executives. But when a close brush with death reveals that the influence he wields makes him a target, impossible cracks appear in his perfect, richly appointed life.
Like everyone else, Dag relies on his digital feed for everything—a feed that is as personal as it is pervasive, and may not be as private as it seems. As he struggles to make sense of the dark forces closing in on him, he discovers that activists are hijacking the feed to manipulate markets and governments. Going public would destroy everything he’s worked so hard to build, but it’s not just Dag’s life on the line—a shadow war is coming, one that will secure humanity’s future or doom the planet to climate catastrophe. Ultimately, Dag must decide the price he’s willing to pay to change the world.
Nathan M. Farrugia – Purity: Episode 7
Expected Release Date 7/1/18
Purity have almost won.
But Olesya has one last chance.
With Jay rescued from Purity territory, Olesya plots their final, daring mission.
To save them all, she will need to do something unimaginable:
Send Jay back into Purity territory.
Only this time, he’s going deep into Purity headquarters.
Alone. Unarmed. Uncover.
Danielle Girard – Expose
Expected Release Date 7/24/18
With her vindictive ex-husband out of prison, San Francisco medical examiner Annabelle Schwartzman is trying harder than ever to move on with her life—by focusing on her job to speak for the victims who can’t. Summoned to a homicide in Golden Gate Park, she realizes that she’d seen the victim just hours before, alive and well in a parked Jeep with a small boy. Now, the woman has been stabbed to death and stripped of her burka, and the child is nowhere to be found.
When an African American student is found dead, bearing knife wounds identical to those of the woman in the park, the press jumps on them as hate crimes. If only they were so easy to explain. There is a connection—but Schwartzman believes it’s something even worse. Her fears are confirmed with the discovery of the next victim.
Now, to stop a vicious killer whose work has only just begun, Schwartzman and Detective Hal Harris must untangle the twisted thread that links it all to the missing boy and a crime buried in the past.
I’m the heroine of savages. I set thrones on fire.
The Brothers and Sisters of the Apocalypse aren’t happy with Micka. She’s blown up their satellite network, and now plans to offer intel to their fiercest enemy — the Sequencer council.
But nothing goes as planned, and soon, the two most powerful global organisations want her dead.
Lines between friend and foe blur.
And Micka is out of options.
Eliot Peper – Borderless
Expected Release Date 10/30/18
Exiled from Washington after a covert operation gone wrong, Diana is building a new life as a freelance spy, though her obsessive secrecy is driving away the few friends and allies she can count on. When she’s hired to investigate the world’s leading techno capitalist, she unknowingly accepts an assignment with a dark ulterior purpose. Navigating a labyrinth of cutouts and false fronts, Diana discovers a plot to nationalize the global feed.
As tech and politics speed toward a catastrophic reckoning, Diana must reconcile the sins of her past with her dreams of tomorrow. How she deploys the secrets in her arsenal will shape the future of a planet on the brink of disaster. Doing the right thing means risking everything to change the rules of the game. But how much is freedom really worth?
Arriving home on Christmas Eve, Commander Gray Pierce discovers his house ransacked, his pregnant lover missing, and his best friend’s wife, Kat, unconscious on the kitchen floor. With no shred of evidence to follow, his one hope to find the woman he loves and his unborn child is Kat, the only witness to what happened. But the injured woman is in a semi-comatose state and cannot speak—until a brilliant neurologist offers a radical approach to “unlock” her mind long enough to ask a few questions.
What Pierce learns from Kat sets Sigma Force on a frantic quest for answers that are connected to mysteries reaching back to the Spanish Inquisition and to one of the most reviled and blood-soaked books in human history—a Medieval text known as the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches. What they uncover hidden deep in the past will reveal a frightening truth in the present and a future on the brink of annihilation, and force them to confront the ultimate question: What does it mean to have a soul?
Just Released
Iris Johansen – Shattered Mirror
Released on 4/24/18
Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan is once again thrown into a deadly game of intrigue when she receives a cryptic package containing a skull and a two sided mirror. Eve is determined to reconstruct the skull and uncover the mystery of the person’s identity, and when she does, the face of a beautiful woman begins to emerge. But who is she?
As Eve gets closer and closer to finding the answer, she becomes swept up in a lethal chase that spans continents and threatens to destroy the family that she has worked so hard to bring together. Eve and her team must work quickly to discover who is behind the murder – and maybe even prevent more loss of life. But how do you fight a killer who is willing to destroy anyone as a means to an end?
Jeffery Deaver – The Cutting Edge
Released on 4/10/18
Vimal Lahori, a twenty-two-year-old apprentice diamond cutter, living with his family in Queens, returns to the jewelry shop where he works on 47th Street in Manhattan to find that his mentor has been tortured and killed in a robbery. Also dead are a young couple, present at the store to pick-up their engagement ring. The killer appears from the back room, sees the young man and shoots and wounds him. Vimal escapes.
Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs, Lon Sellitto and the other law enforcers they work with begin their pursuit of the murderer, who, they learn, has made off with five million dollars’ worth of unique “rough,” that is, uncut diamonds. They realize too that he’s trying to find and kill Vimal, the only witness to the horrific crime.
The motive for the murders soon surfaces when the self-proclaimed “Promisor”—the psychotic Vladimir Rostov—announces that he is targeting dealers and engaged couples for defiling diamonds by cutting them up into jewelry—to satisfy their vanity. In ancient religion these gems were thought to be the soul of the earth; it was a sin to cut and polish them. Rostov continues his search for Vimal and targets more victims, who have to pay for their iniquities. The madman also turns his attention, and his razor knife and gun, to the police who are pursuing him.
Rhyme and Sachs soon learn that the diamond world is a place that’s as mysterious and forbidding as it is glamorous, and is largely off-limits to outsiders, so they recruit a quirky, brilliant expert in the esoteric art of diamonds: Alan Ackroyd. He and Rhyme form a relationship that’s both professional and personal and, together with Sachs, they engage in a tense cat and mouse chase to find the man they have dubbed Unsub 47 . . . and to locate Vimal Lahori too, who, with reasons of his own for avoiding the police, has vanished.
As the case proceeds—and Rostov targets more victims—Rhyme also has to make a difficult decision: should he consult for the legal team defending the ruthless Mexican drug lord, El Halcon, who has been captured in the U.S. and charged with violent crimes. The man is unquestionably a cruel and dangerous criminal but his lawyers are positive he’s not guilty of the offenses he’s charged with; someone has manipulated the evidence in the name of justice to send him to prison. Please, they implore Rhyme, will he help them keep an innocent, if evil, man out of jail?
In their efforts to stop Unsub 47 before he kills again, Rhyme and Sachs and their team work relentlessly to find and make sense of clues throughout the New York area—from the Diamond District of Manhattan, to the Palisades in New Jersey, to Little India in Jackson Heights, to a geothermal site in Brooklyn, where drilling has not only resulted in the fiery deaths of local residents but makes Amelia Sachs’s effort to gather vital evidence a potentially lethal proposition.
Kevin Tinto – Ice Genesis
Released on 3/26/18
The Americans and Russians are racing toward nuclear confrontation over a mind-blowing find under the ice in Antarctica. The American Executive Branch is in meltdown over the President’s order to detonate a highly classified Iso-Hafnium nuclear device in Antarctica, killing a platoon of Navy SEALs and the same number of Russian Special Operation, Spetnaz.
Dr. Leah Andrews and Jack Hobson, having escaped the President’s plan to eliminate them have the upper hand, thanks to a nuclear device hidden in the New Mexico desert. This leverage will only last so long, and the key to unlocking the mystery lies with twenty-eight Native American, cliff dwellers, who survived more than eight-hundred years, under the ICE in stasis.
While Leah tries to untangle the mysteries of the ‘Ancients’, Jack Hobson is trying to protect Leah, and the Ancients, while finding himself drawn into another mystery; is there more of these high technology caches? If so, how will they secure them before other interested parties, including the Russians locate them?
The key to the mystery, as Leah learns, is one of the Ancients. A Lakota Shaman, named Appanoose. He has no interest in cooperating with Leah; just as she learns stunning new facts about the Ancients and what happened to them more than eight-hundred years ago.
Leah and Jack find themselves the targets of not only the US government, but foreign powers and even the Ancients themselves.
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child – City of Endless Night
Released on 1/16/18
It begins as a manhunt for Grace Ozmian, the missing daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire. At first, the NYPD assumes Grace, beautiful, reckless, and a regular feature of the local tabloids, has simply sped off on another wild adventure. But the case becomes something altogether different when the young woman’s body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head nowhere to be found.
Lieutenant CDS Vincent D’Agosta quickly takes the lead. He knows his investigation will attract fierce scrutiny, so D’Agosta is delighted when FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast shows up at the crime scene also assigned to the case. “I feel rather like Brer Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch,” Pendergast tells D’Agota, “because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Museum of Natural History.”
D’Agosta hopes the case will give Pendergast an opportunity to demonstrate his considerable abilities back in the city he has made home. But neither Pendergast nor D’Agosta are prepared for what lies ahead. It quickly becomes clear that a diabolical presence is haunting the greater metropolitan area, and Grace Ozmian was only the first of many victims to be murdered…and decapitated. Worse still, there’s something unique to the city itself that has attracted its evil eye of the killer–or killers.
As mass hysteria sets in, Pendergast and D’Agosta find themselves in the crosshairs of an opponent who has threatened the very lifeblood of the city. It’ll take all of Pendergast’s skill to unmask this most dangerous foe–let alone survive to tell the tale.
A-Thrill-A-Week 