Release dates for the newest additions to the series that I have reviewed.
Soon to be Released
Avanti Centrae – The Doomsday Medallion
Expected Release Date 3/8/22
Newly minted black ops officer Maddy Marshall is celebrating the completion of her training when news of a military takeover in the South China Sea shocks the world because it was predicted by a sixteen-year-old French student. When intel chatter spells danger to Avril, the young seer, VanOps Director Bowman assigns Maddy and her twin brother, Will, to protect the girl.
Emotions between the siblings are running hot due to their aunt’s recent stroke, which has reminded them of the childhood accident that scarred both his chin and her heart. Tensions ratchet higher when they arrive at Avril’s home to find the instant social media star has been kidnapped, leaving them with only clenched fists and cryptic clues that lead to a sixteenth-century formula encoded on an etched-bronze medallion.
While Taiwan fears an invasion that will set off an apocalyptic chain of events, Maddy and Will race through medieval French towns, Italian cathedrals, and ancient Greek temples attempting to find Avril before their enemies use the girl to discover the Holy Grail of military intelligence. If the team fails, they won’t need a crystal ball to know millions of innocent souls will be destined to join Nostradamus in the afterlife.
Casey Hill – Last Girl Alive
Expected Release Date 3/12/22
If you could find out when you’ll die – WOULD you?
Learning her expiry date doesn’t sound like much of a birthday present to Rae, but it’s been that way for everyone since the Cryptograph was introduced. A biological algorithm developed by Silicon Valley, it can determine with precise accuracy the lifespan of every human being on the planet.
Everyone gets tested when they come of age, but Rae wants to opt out. She hates how the system labels and categorizes society according to longevity – like Transients, whose short lifespan automatically renders them useless, Interims, the hard-working majority – or elite Constants, whose long lives guarantee opportunity and power.
But when Rae’s intentions to avoid the test are impeded and her lifespan is revealed, the future seems set in stone.
Or does it…?
Timothy S. Johnston – Island of Light
Expected Release Date 3/21/22
The problem isn’t hiding the body and cleaning the blood — that part’s easy. The real problem is the identity of the Admiral’s killer: Meg McClusky, Truman “Mac” McClusky’s twin sister. She stabbed USSF Admiral Taurus T. Benning in the chest and neck, murdering the man who killed their father all those years ago.
Soon the USSF sends a tenacious investigator to the underwater city of Trieste, and what started as an unplanned act of revenge quickly snowballs into a deadly game of cat and mouse in the underwater colonies. Mac, the city’s mayor, has been waging war against the world’s underwater superpowers, and the last thing he and his team needs is the United States Submarine Fleet at Trieste and yet another vicious occupation.
But within days, despite Mac’s best efforts to protect Meg, the investigator takes her away for torture and interrogation. To further complicate things, the USSF has occupied the nearby underwater colony of Seascape, and is quickly relocating the bulk of their warsub fleet there to keep watch over the anxious Gulf population who are increasingly calling for independence.
Mac must pull the trigger on his greatest feat ever if he’s going to achieve peace and independence for his city. He must launch a desperate rescue mission to bring back his sister, pull more underwater cities into his alliance, remove the USSF from Seascape, and work with a brilliant addition to his team to create an impossible new bomb. And the clock is ticking.
James Rollins – Kingdom of Bones
Expected Release Date 4/19/22
It begins in Africa . . .
A United Nations relief team in a small village in the Congo makes an alarming discovery. An unknown force is leveling the evolutionary playing field. Men, women, and children have been reduced to a dull, cattle-like state. The natural world surrounding them—plants and animals—have grown more cunning and predatory, evolving at an exponential pace. The insidious phenomenon is spreading across the African continent, threatening the rest of the world. But is it a natural event? Or more terrifyingly, did someone engineer it?
What has made the biosphere run amok? Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force are prepared for the extraordinary and have kept the world safe—vigilance for which they have paid a tragic personal price. Yet even these brilliant and seasoned scientific warriors do not understand what is behind this frightening development—or know how to stop it. As they race across the nation and around the globe—from Washington D.C. to the densest jungles of Africa—to find answers, the members of Sigma realize they have become prey.
To head off global catastrophe, Sigma Force risks their lives to uncover the shattering secret at the heart of a biosphere run amok—a truth that will illuminate who we are as a species and where we may be headed . . . sooner than we know.
Mother Nature—red in tooth and claw—is turning against humankind, plummeting the entire world into The Kingdom of Bones.
Iris Johansen – A Face to Die For
Expected Release Date 6/14/22
Eve Duncan is in a race against time to unearth one of the world’s most intriguing secrets, which has been lost to history.
Kathy Reichs – Cold Cold Bones
Expected Release Date 7/5/22
Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. For a while, temporarily idle forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. But when mother and daughter meet at Tempe’s place one night for dinner, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball.
GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine Monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. Soon after, Tempe examines a mummified corpse in a state park, and her anxiety deepens.
There seems to be no pattern to these random killings, except that each mimics in some way a killing that a younger Tempe witnessed, analyzed, or barely escaped. Who or what is targeting her, and why?
Helping Tempe discover the answers is detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, retired but still volunteering with the CMPD cold case unit—and still displaying his gallows humor. As the two penetrate a bizarre survivalist’s lair, even Skinny’s mood darkens.
And then Tempe’s daughter Katy disappears.
At its core, Cold, Cold Bones is a novel of revenge and why revisiting the past may be the only way to rescue the present.
Tess Gerritsen – Listen To Me
Expected Release Date 7/5/22
Mothers know best . . . But who will listen?
Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are newly plagued by what seems like a completely senseless murder. Sofia Suarez, a widow and nurse who was universally liked by her neighbors, lies bludgeoned to death in her own home. But anything can happen behind closed doors, and Sofia seemed to have plenty of secrets in her last days, making covert phone calls to traceless burner phones. When Jane finally makes a connection between Sofia and the victim of a hit-and-run from months earlier, the case only grows more blurry. What exactly was Sofia involved in? One thing is clear: The killer will do anything it takes to keep their secret safe.
Meanwhile, Angela Rizzoli hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in all the years since her daughter became a homicide detective. Maybe the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree: Nothing in Angela’s neighborhood gets by her—not the gossip about a runaway teenager down the block and definitely not the strange neighbors who have just moved in across the street. Angela’s sure there’s no such thing as coincidence in her sleepy suburb. If only Jane would listen—instead she writes off Angela’s concerns as the result of an overactive imagination. But Angela’s convinced there’s a real wolf in her vicinity, and her cries might now fall on deaf ears.
With so much happening on the Sofia case, Jane and Maura already struggle to see the forest for the trees, but will they lose sight of something sinister happening much closer to home?
Lincoln Child – Chrysalis
Expected Release Date 7/5/22
Like millions of people around the world, Jeremy Logan (famed enigmalogist, or investigator of unexplained things) has grown to rely on his incredible new tech device. Made by Chrysalis, the global multibillion dollar tech company, the small optical device connects people in a stunning new way, tapping into virtual reality for the first time on a wide scale.
And yet, when Logan is summoned by Chrysalis to investigate a disturbing anomaly in the massive new product rollout, Logan is shocked to see the true scope of the massive company. He also quickly realizes that something in Chrysalis’s technology is very wrong, and could be potentially devastating. The question is what, and where, is the danger coming from? In Lincoln Child’s wildly inventive new novel, high tech comes to life alongside the myriad dangers it poses, making for one of Child’s most infectious, entertaining thrillers to date.
Just Released
Brandt Legg – Cosega Strike
Released on 12/31/21
The Pharaoh’s Eysen has fallen into the wrong hands.
War is coming with the Havloses.
There is a traitor among the Cosegans.
Only days remain on the Terminus Clock.
And things are about to get worse.
Facing the end of civilization, there is only one chance.
Rip and Gale must decipher the hidden clues of Nostradamus and Leonardo da Vinci.
It is beyond impossible.
Yet, maybe the impossible can save them all.
Nick Thacker – The Embers of Siwa
Released on 12/15/21
The tomb of Alexander the Great has been found.
…but there’s no one inside. Instead, what they find is far more terrifying.
And far more deadly.
An island prison complex is found off the coast of Turkey, and Reggie and Freddie want to find out just who might be held there.
Meanwhile, Professor Sarah Lindgren travels to Egypt to find her father, who mysteriously disappeared while on a dig with his students.
Through it all, there’s one organization still hounding the CSO team, and they’re more intent than ever to see their mission through.
Their mission? Kill the CSO team — every last one of them.
Join the CSO team in the latest nonstop action-adventure thriller of epic proportions!
Patricia Cornwell – Autopsy
Released on 11/30/21
Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has returned to Virginia as the chief medical examiner. She and her husband Benton are headquartered five miles from the Pentagon, in a post-pandemic world that’s been torn apart by civil and political unrest.
Just weeks into the job, Scarpetta is called to investigate a woman’s body which has been shockingly displayed on railroad tracks. As Scarpetta follows the trail, it leads unnervingly close to her own neighbourhood …
At the same time, two scientists are found dead in a top-secret laboratory in outer space. Scarpetta is summoned to the White House Situation Room and tasked with finding out what happened. But even as she’s working the first crime scene in space from the ground, an apparent serial killer strikes again. And this time, Scarpetta could be in greater danger than ever before…
Jeffery Deaver – The Midnight Lock
Released on 11/30/21
When a woman arrives home to her Manhattan apartment to find that her personal items have been rearranged while she slept, police initially dismiss her complaint. Nothing was stolen, and there’s no sign of breaking and entering. But when the same woman turns up dead, Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate the murder. The soon learn that the murderer calls himself “the Locksmith.” He is obsessed with locks, slipping into homes in the dead of night and tying his victims up with knots or locks, ultimately strangling them.
Their hunt for the killer is interrupted when an internal investigation in the police force uncovers what seems to be a crucial mistake in one of Rhyme’s previous cases. He is removed from the case, and must investigate the Locksmith in secret to untangle the mysteries behind the psychotic killer before he can set his ultimate trap.
Jeffery Deaver – A Perfect Plan
Released on 9/28/21
A deviously clever story featuring the beloved forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme.
When the FBI comes to Lincoln Rhyme with the news that a mysterious assassin is targeting him, the detective is not particularly concerned. With his long career putting away criminals, he is accustomed to threats on his life, and has designed his Upper West Side townhome to be secure against nearly any threat. But when the assassin gets too close for comfort, shadowing Rhyme and his wife Amelia Sachs as they go about their daily life, Rhyme determines to find out why this person is after him. He must put himself inside the mind of a killer in order to save his own life, and possibly the lives of those he loves most.