Lethal

Starred review from July 11, 2011
At the start of this pulse-pounding thriller from bestseller Brown (Tough Customer), Honor Gillette is baking cupcakes in the kitchen of her Tambour, La., home when her four-year-old daughter, Emily, tells her a bloodied man is outside in the yard. Lee Coburn is on the run, the object of a manhunt for the cold-blooded murder of seven people, including one of Tambour's most prominent citizens. Promising not to harm Emily, Lee takes Honor hostage, but only because she may have the key to solving an even bigger puzzle: the identity of the Bookkeeper, a criminal mastermind with power over local law enforcement and government. Honor's policeman husband, Eddie, who died in an accident two years earlier, may have had information about the mysterious and malicious Bookkeeper. When it becomes apparent that the mass murders and Eddie's death might be connected, trying to prove the link could cost Lee and Honor their lives. A relentless pace and clever plot twists keep the pages turning.

October 31, 2011
In Brown’s latest romantic thriller, beautiful young widow Honor Gillette and her four-year-old daughter, Emily, wind up on the run through coastal Louisiana with a suspected mass murderer named Lee Coburn. Given the genre, it should come as no surprise that the rugged, self-reliant Coburn is no homicidal maniac and that he and Honor will eventually fall in love. Everything else is up for grabs, since the cops, nearly all of Honor’s former friends, and maybe even the FBI are in the employ of a vicious drug lord and white slaver known only as the Bookkeeper. The villains are ruthless, the action perilous and plentiful, and Victor Slezak’s narration wrings every drop of suspense from Brown’s twisting and turning plot. Slezak also provides a full range of Southern accents: Honor’s aristocratic, angry bully of a father-in-law, the redneck local law enforcement louts, and a sweetly sexy woman of means. Slezak even adds timidity and self-doubt to his portrayal of an FBI agent struggling with an impossible investigation, a passive-aggressive wife, and a permanently comatose child. A Grand Central hardcover.