K Street

October 17, 2016
Early in Lawson’s fast-paced third Kay Hamilton novel (after 2015’s Viking Bay), the former DEA agent heads one evening to her current employer, the Callahan Group, located on K Street in Washington, D.C., in order to resign. When she runs into heavily armed men exiting the Callahan office with a safe, she shoots one dead with her Glock, but two others escape. Inside, she finds her boss, Thomas Callahan, gravely wounded. Later, in the hospital, Callahan conveys a single name to her, Olivia Prescott, before lapsing into a coma. Kay doesn’t know what was in the safe, who Prescott might be, or even who’s behind Callahan and his black-ops missions. She only knows that she wants answers and that time is ticking. Lawson writes great action pieces, but some of his character’s reactions don’t ring true. Primary among these is the question of why Kay is so dogged in her pursuit of Callahan’s attackers, given her own tenuous relation with the man. This makes for an exciting if not always believable story. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company.

November 15, 2016
Kay Hamilton--former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and woman of steel--takes on the all-knowing National Security Agency in the third entry in Lawson's series (Viking Bay, 2015, etc.).Dividing the timeline into days and hours, Lawson's latest starts with a crime at the office of Hamilton's employer, covert intelligence agency the Callahan Group. Bad guy Otis and his crew break in, kill a couple of the company's employees, and steal the safe. Thomas Callahan fights back, killing one of the intruders, but he's badly wounded in the process. Enter Hamilton, deadly, beautiful, and dismissed from the DEA. She goes on the offensive, trading bullets with the bad guys before her boss whispers that it has something to do with the NSA. Hamilton enlists the NSA's Olivia Prescott to help her find the men who attacked Callahan's, has a steamy interlude with her sexy, filthy-rich lover, Eli Dolan, reflects on her brilliant daughter away at Duke studying to be a physician, and unravels a conspiracy that involves both ultraconservative brothers and hard-left liberals, a drunken woman who never speaks in anything less than a scream, and some bad Chinese players. Lawson's mechanical writing style--with its passive constructions and relentless physical descriptions of every character, no matter how minor--proves uniformly dull. Although the author gets points for trying to make the plot relevant to today's headlines, he ultimately offers the reader no one to care about: Hamilton has no depth nor anything that makes her particularly sympathetic or endearing. As a result, any vulnerability she has wields the emotional impact of a bowl of cornflakes: it has a little flavor, but it's not at all memorable. With characters as flat as construction paper and a formulaic plot, this book manages what other thrillers about the NSA have failed to do: make it boring.

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