The Assassins

April 27, 2015
Bestseller Lynds (The Book of Spies) starts more strongly than she finishes this romance-laced suspense novel. In Baghdad in April, 2003, six international assassins, to whom Saddam Hussein owes $12 million, are worried that they’ll never get paid after the American invaders confiscate all the dictator’s assets. So they steal a limestone tablet worth $12 million from a museum, but the artifact ends up broken into multiple pieces, and the murderous crew’s British member, Burleigh Morgan, is blown up in his car after he attempts to reassemble it. Meanwhile, former military intelligence operative Judd Ryder returns home to Washington, D.C., where he finds that someone is impersonating him and soon witnesses his double’s murder. Judd teams with apprentice CIA spy Eva Blake (“of the long red hair and the cobalt-blue eyes that could pierce him to the soul”) to figure out what’s going on. A routine plot and stock characters make this a lesser effort for Lynds. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

June 15, 2015

Former CIA agent Judd Ryder sees a man leave his townhouse: he looks like Ryder and he's wearing Ryder's clothes. The man is killed in a hit-and-run that's clearly no accident. Did the driver think the victim was Ryder? A complicated trail of clues reveals that the key to this event lies in an infamous theft years before when six assassins entered Saddam Hussein's palace during the Iraq War and stole a cuneiform clay tablet. Now someone's murdering the assassins one by one. It's an insider, but who and why? The answer is far-fetched but readers won't mind, getting there is what's fun. VERDICT Olen Steinhauer it's not, but spy thriller lovers will enjoy Lynds's tenth romp (after The Book of Spies). [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]--DK

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