Black Fall

January 2, 2017
Thriller Award–finalist Mayne’s enthralling third Jessica Blackwood novel (after 2015’s Name of the Devil) finds the FBI agent on a stakeout of a serial killer in a Washington, D.C., apartment building, where she’s attacked by a knife-wielding woman holding a baby. Jessica rescues the baby, but the woman gets away, her identity and motive for the attack a mystery. Later that day, an earthquake rocks the area. Jessica and her team learn of a videotape featuring Nobel Prize–winning physicist Peter Devon, who seems to have predicted the earthquake and warned about the coming of something called Black Fall—but Devon has been dead for eight years. Jessica, “an only child in a dysfunctional family of traveling magicians,” thinks she knows how he did it, but the terror is just beginning: as more frightening predictions roll in and riots rock the city, the knife-wielding woman turns up dead. The author, a professional magician, makes the impossible seem probable in this twisty, clever treat. Agent: Erica Spellman-Silverman, Trident Media Group.

February 1, 2017
FBI agent Jessica Blackwood is pulled off a serial-killer case after she's attacked by a knife-wielding woman carrying a kidnapped infant. But Blackwood, with her keen instincts and background in illusionism, is needed for something bigger. Hours after an earthquake rocks Washington, D.C., a video is released of a scientist predicting the eventeasy enough to do, after the fact, except that the man making the prediction has been dead for eight years. When the same man predicts, in another video, a deadly natural disaster in a particular region in Bolivia, and a flood comes that kills hundreds, Blackwood and colleagues look for a group that is somehow causing, not just predicting, such catastrophies. In the midst of severe civil unrestcaused by the predictions, police shootings in D.C., and power blackouts along the East CoastBlackwood must not only look for a suspicious cult, but also watch her back, as repeated attempts are made on her life. The third Jessica Blackwood novel (after Name of the Devil, 2015) delivers more fast-paced entertainment, unsettling despite some plausibility issues, from magician-author Mayne.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)