A Dangerous Breed

February 1, 2020

In three-time Edgar nominee Abbott's Never Ask Me, the murder of adoption consultant Danielle Roberts in an upscale Austin neighborhood upends the Pollitt family, who feel grief, relief, and suspicion ("Never ask me what I'd do to protect my family," says the wife) (50,000-copy first printing). In three-time Edgar nominee Atkins's The Revelators, Sheriff Quinn Colson, bullet-holed and left for dead, is feeling vengeful but kept from getting back to work by the interim sheriff--who ordered his murder. Continuing No. 1 New York Times best-selling Coulter's popular "FBI Thriller" series, Deadlock has FBI Special Agent Lacey Sherlock and husband Dillon Savich dealing with a psychopath, a secret from beyond the grave, and three red boxes puzzlingly containing the puzzle pieces of an unknown town (200,000-copy first printing). The multi-award-winning Hamilton's A Dangerous Breed brings back Van Shaw, tracking down the (worse-than-he-thought) father who abandoned him before birth while aiming to block a sociopath by stealing a viral weapon that could bring death to thousands (100,000-copy first printing). The acclaimed Kellermans' Half Moon Bay brings back Deputy Coroner Clay Edison, confounded by the discovery of a decades-old child's skeleton in a torn-up park and a local businessman's claim that it could be his sister. In mega-best-selling Camilla Läckberg's The Golden Cage, the increasingly restless wife of a billionaire learns that he is having an affair and exacts luscious revenge. Patterson and Tebbetts join in 1st Case, wherein Angela Hoot gets kicked out of MIT's graduate school, joins the FBI's cyber-forensics unit, and must deal with a messaging app whose beta users are dying without getting killed herself (475,000-copy first printing). In When She Was Good, the Gold Dagger-winning and Edgar short-listed Robotham continues the story of criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac, the girl without a past, first revealed in last year's Good Girl, Bad Girl. And though there are no plot details to share regarding Silva's Untitled new Gabriel Allon thriller, the print run is 500,000, and word has it that MGM has acquired the rights to adapt the entire series for television.

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Starred review from August 3, 2020
In Edgar finalist Hamilton’s exceptional fifth novel featuring professional thief Van Shaw (after 2019’s Mercy River), Van runs afoul of hacker Bilal Nath, who threatens to harm Van’s adoptive family unless Van agrees to steal an unknown item from a Seattle biotechnology company. Van assumes it’s a cure for Nath’s ALS, but discovers instead that the company holds the only viable cryogenically preserved ova of Nath’s wife, Aura, who became sterile after undergoing chemo for ovarian cancer. The couple hope to have a child. Meanwhile, Van is trying to find his unknown father, who may have abandoned him and his mother 30 years earlier. This personal quest leads Van to a dangerous Ukrainian arms dealer. A former U.S. Army Ranger, Van is highly capable, but he’s not ridiculously so, and he’s ready to accept assistance from others, including new friend Wren Marchand, who helps get him out of more than one jam. Action sequences nicely balance planning and surveillance scenes, and plenty of surprises keep readers guessing. Hamilton makes the connections among his satisfyingly realized characters seem so natural that the whole feels like something that might actually happen. Hopefully, Van will be back soon. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron Priest Literary.