Killing Pace

September 4, 2017
Schofield (Storm Rising) enlivens a standard plot about a framed law-enforcement agent with some uncommon elements. In early 2015, amnesiac Lisa Green, who was in a car crash two months earlier, recovers her memory in Florida’s Everglades City. She realizes that she has been held prisoner for weeks, by a man purporting to be her boyfriend, and that she is in fact Laura Pace, an undercover Customs and Border Protection officer. Flash back to the previous year. Under an alias, Laura travels to Sicily, where she uncovers an illegal international adoption scheme operating between the island and Miami. Those responsible for the crime frame her for the murder of a couple in Miami and attempt to dispose of her by engineering the car crash. With her memory restored, Laura is determined to clear her name, bring the guilty parties to justice, and find a missing baby. Laura recruits an unusual group of allies, who range from members of a shadowy U.N. intelligence unit to a mobster from Schofield’s previous novel. It’s to Schofield’s credit that a potential romance remains only that. Readers will eagerly await his next mystery. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management.

September 1, 2017
Schofield drops the paranormal elements that made his first two thrillers (Storm Rising, 2016, etc.) hyphenated creatures for the more earthbound tale of a Homeland Security agent fighting a vicious baby-laundering operation.Make that relatively earthbound, since the story hits the ground running and swiftly develops surrealistically multilayered complications. After cutting abruptly away from Lisa May Green, who's survived a fatal car crash only to be imprisoned by Roland Lewis, the fiance she has no memory of, Schofield focuses on Sarah Lockhart, a Customs and Border Protection officer posted to Sicily to help the local Guardia di Finanza and Immigration people screen ships carrying questionable mercantile and human cargo. At least that's what she thinks she'll be doing until she's pulled more and more insistently into investigating a series of crimes way outside her bailiwick: the smuggling of infant refugees whose counterfeit papers have laundered them thoroughly enough to be adopted by wealthy, influential Americans like Kenneth and Darlene Eden. Forming a series of remarkably fluid tag-team alliances with U.N. official Renate Richter, private security specialist Conrad Nelthorp, Florida Detective Scott Jardine, and her current line manager and former supervisor, Phyllis Corbin, Sarah follows the adoption trail to New Jersey Mafia boss Dominic Lanza and Sicilian mobsters Antonio and Gustavo Mazzara and soon finds that she can account for only 41 of the 42 babies smuggled into the United States and that sometimes mob bosses are more reliable allies than employees of the U.S. government. All this is every bit as complicated as it sounds, especially when you throw in Sarah's painfully recurring memories of her grandmother's nightmarish World War II experience, her getting framed for the murders of the Edens, and the case of Lisa May Green (remember her?). Muscular, overplotted intrigue that will have some readers checking their blood pressures and others their wristwatches.

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