Book Bytes by Marylaine Block Books Too Good To Put Down: Thrillers

note: if you want to get your hands on any of these books, and they're out of print, click here for suggestions on how to find them.

Disaster Novels -- Political and Financial Thrillers -- Serial Killers, Mad Bombers, and Other Twisted People -- Survival Stories -- Techno-thrillers

Disaster Novels

• Richard Barth. Jumper. Sam Garvey is one of the world's best roller-coaster designers, and a logical person for NTSB investigator Rachel White to call on when two roller coasters have been sabotaged, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries. He's designing a complex coaster that jumps across a gap, and is under intense deadline pressure from the owner of the amusement park; furthermore, his assistant is feeding info to the boss without his knowledge. Worse, the FBI believes Garvey is himself the saboteur; somehow aware of Sam's movements, the saboteur took out coasters in places Garvey visited. Since Rachel is consorting with him, she's removed from the investigation. A banker friend of Garvey's figures out that there's a connection with big-time financial hanky-panky, and investors who don't mind seeing people die so they can make a killing selling short.
  
  
• Jon Berson. Foamers. A terrific thriller about train fanatics on the trail of a train saboteur who is busy recreating classic train accidents. The train killer is being stalked by an FBI agent, Jennifer Sczimanski, and by a foamer, Larry McBride, who runs the Philadelphia transit authority. At first they suspect each other, as they have each worked out what trains are likely targets, and are each on one that they prevent from crashing in New York; they then run into each other again on a western train that again is scheduled for disaster. But they begin to pool their knowledge, and board a train that undergoes a ventilation catastrophe in a tunnel under the mountains. Saving the train, they copnverge on the killer in Philadelphia.

• Robert Byrne. The Dam. An engineer realizes that a dam he's designed is in danger of falling. His company is unwilling to admit error, so he must personally warn the people below about the danger they're in.
  
  
• Allan Eckert. The Hab Theory. A scientist believes that one of the periodical reversals of the magnetic pole is due to happen again soon, with catastrophic results for the human race. The evidence he has for this theory stretches across the realms of geology, biology, physics, and chemistry, and the scientific community is so specialized that none of them understand or accept the totality of his evidence. So he takes dramatic measures to force the world to pay attention to his theories. Once they understand the implications, they, and their governments, have to work together, and fast, to preserve themselves from the coming catastrophe. One interesting side effect of this book, for me, at least, was doing research to find out what the science behind this scenario was.
  
  
• Peter Hernon. 8.4. Geologists investigating the New Madrid Fault realize that it's about to let loose. The only question is, will it be one earthquake, or a series as in 1812? The quakes are over 8 on the Richter, in a land formation that allows the earth to shake and liquify over thousands of miles, an earthquake affecting Chicago, Nashville, Indianapolis, Memphis, Cincinnati, and every town within that boundary, with dams collapsing, buildings falling, water lines broken, and nothing to stop the fires. Thousands of people are dead, and the question is whether to try and stop a 3rd one from happening, as the quakes seem to be activiating new faults. Should they shoot a nuclear bomb into the ground to create a smaller quake to draw down the effects of the 3rd quake they think is coming.
  
  
• David Campbell Hill. Deadly Messiah. When a town is wiped out by a plague of total immune system breakdown (note that this was written before AIDS was well-known), the hero is unaffected; it turns out that the unaffected people all had in common being outside the town at the critical moment when a madman with a messiah complex used the town's power grid to cause the catastrophe. The killer strikes again, and again--each time, taking on a larger target area. The hero, aided by a beautiful female astrologist, is able to figure out what the madman's ultimate target is and catch him in the act. This is gripping and suspenseful, and also presents one of the best cases for astrology I've ever seen.
  
  
• Christopher Hyde. Jericho Falls. When bioengineered bacteria are spilled in the small town of Jericho Falls, the army moves in, not to save the townspeople, but to wipe them out to prevent the bacteria, and the story, from spreading. The townspeople, understandably, fight back.
  
  
• Richard Moran. The Empire of Ice. Moran is the master of geological thrillers, of which he has written several. In this one, a volcano has formed an island in the north Atlantic, diverting the warm ocean current that made England's climate livable. As they enter a perpetual winter, England has exactly 17 days of fuel reserves left, and is cut off from the world as icebergs destroy the channel and cut off all shipping. Geothermal resources can save them, but half the geothermal field lies in Ireland's waters, and Ireland is already on the brink of declaring war on England. A geothermal engineer and the woman heading England's artificial biosphere project work against the deadline to figure out a solution. The sequel is called Earth Winter.
  
  
• Yvonne Navarro. Final Impact. A rogue planet is due to crash into the earth, and society changes dramatically while planning for it--planning ahead, the value of money, and an entire middle class value system become pointless in the face of certain planetary destruction. After the planet hits, a few survivors with psi capabilities are drawn together. Great characters, and an interesting plot.
  
  
• Pierre Oulette. The Third Pandemic. Shows exactly what conjunction of events could create a species of bacteria immune to all antibiotics, that could kill of half the world's population. Researcher Elaine Wilkes has produced a computer model of such a bug, which she wants to turn over to the CDC; her employers see its profit potential and want to keep it to themselves, develop a drug, and wait until enough people have died that the people left will spend any amount of money for the drug. She takes her program and runs, pursued by corporate thugs. Meanwhile, the killer bug has not only been created--it's fallen into the hands of a crazed killer. Especially scary because the killer bug is possible, and so many bacteria are already immune to antibiotics.
  
  
• Ridley Pearson. Hard Fall. An FBI agent has been pursuing the terrorists who bombed the plane his wife and son were on. When a flight simulator trainer for a new jumbo jet is found murdered, the agent finds that he had been with the killer in the simulator, modeling a loss of pilot control after a takeoff at the Los Angeles airport. Sure enough, a plane goes down after takeoff at the LA airport, following the exact same scenario, but there is no obvious reason for the crash. The agent has to prove the link in order not to be reassigned, and soon, because he has deduced the next likely date and target.
  
  
• Kevin Robinson. Split Seconds. Paraplegic reporter Nick Foster discovers the murdered body of his friend, a NASA scientist. He also finds a small laser disc; it turns out to be a backup disk for the guidance program for the rocket launches, and both the FBI and the bad guys are determined to get their hands on it. He finally realizes, after a number of attempts on his life, that the disk contains the secret of a terrorist plot. Pretty exciting stuff..
  
  
• Chuck Scarborough. Aftershock. New York City is hit by an earthquake. This has all the usual disaster novel trappings: we get to see all kinds of human drama, as people try, or fail, to survive the disaster, and as the disaster brings out the best and worst attributes of human nature. But an interesting side feature is the politics of it, because politicians like Jesse Helms hate cities, especially New York City; the question is, will they help rebuild it.
  
  
• Thomas Scortia. The Glass Inferno. One of the two movies on which the movie was based; the other is Richard Martin Stern's novel, The Tower. Both of them are great human drama about the people trapped inside when a skyscraper catches on fire. The scret of a good disaster novel is to give us a group of widely assorted characters, good and bad, give us a chance to know about them and what they're up to, and let us see how they behave in a crisis, whether they rise above themselves, whether they survive.
  
  
• Richard Martin Stern. The Big Bridge. Like so many of Stern's books (The Tower, Flood, Tsunami, Wildfire, etc.), this is a book about men who take enormous risks and use power daringly and wisely. Here, engineer Sam Taylor is dubious about the bridge his boss has contracted to build over the Tama Gorge - it has the makings of a killer, too high, too incredibly windy, with too much politics involved, because the bridge will open up a whole wild part of New Mexico to development. When his boss has a stroke, Sam has no choice but to take over, directing all the projects of his firm all over the world. Eventually he has to learn to choose good men and let them do their jobs and offer his help and advice from the sidelines - but not before a tornado places the bridge and his men in jeopardy.
  
  
• Walter Wager. 58 Minutes. A terrorist has blown up all the radar installations in the New York aea and has jammed radio signals between planes, leaving them to try to com in, blind, in the middle of a winter storm. 58 minutes is the amount of time it will take an incoing jumbo jet to use all its remaining fuel. This is powerful human drama. Also Tunnel. Gunther is leader of an East German spy team gone rogue; they've been committing bank robberies, and now plan to end their criminal career by getting 10 million bucks from NYC to keep them from bombing the Lincoln tunnel (though they plan to do it anyway). Ex-Seal Jake Malloy, and NYPD captain is part of the joint task force with the FBI on terrorism, and also has a lover who's an undercover DEA agent whose life is at risk in the tunnel operation. Understanding how these guys think and how to dismantle their operation takes genius, ruthlessness, and extraordinary resourcefulness, but he's up to the job.
  
  
  
  
  

  Serial Killers. Mad Bombers, and Other Twisted People

• Michael Allegretto. The Watchmen. Lauren Caylor thinks she has the ideal life--a new husband, who adores her and her daughter. But she begins to notice that someone is following her, and that her husband is nervous about something and lying to her about it. This makes her realize how little she really knows about her husband, and when she does some checking, she finds that what she does know is a lie. That's how she learns that he's in the Federal Witness Protection Program, that the people who want to kill him are on his trail, and that the FBI plans to use them as bait.
  
  
• Bethany Campbell. See How They Run. Autistic twins witness the killing of a Mafia don by a Colombian hitman. When their teacher Laura reports this to the police, she and the twins are taken into the care of US Attorney Michael MOntana and several FBI agents, but there's a leak, and they're nearly killed. Montana and another agent take Laura and the kids on the run, refusing to tell his superiors where they are. The Colombians are also after them, desperate to conceal the fact that the hitman was the son of the Colombian president. Lots of blood, lots of suspense, revolving around characters we really care about.
  
  
• John Case. The Murder Artist. Newly divorced TV news correspondent Alex Callahan takes his visiting twin sons to a renaissance fair, where they are kidnapped. He's the prime suspect, but once he's cleared, he's determined to find the children. He starts exploring all the twin kidnappings in the FBI database and discovers the horrifying pattern that threatens his sons' lives. He has to figure out the kidnapper's motives and rescue his sons before they're scheduled to die.
  
  
• Lee Child. Running Blind. Army women are being killed in a bizarre way, and the only thing they seem to have in common is that they accused someone of sexual harassment, and ex-Army MP Jack Reacher was the one who dealt with their cases. When the FBI comes to arrest Reacher, he's able to demonstrate he couldn't have done the crimes, so they enlist him as a consultant. But they won't listen when he tells them this is not weird sexual sadism at work but a plot based on the standard motives for murder: money, fear, or revenge. See also One Shot. When former sniper James Barr is arrested for the sniper attack in an Indiana city that kills 5, he denies involvement and says only, "get Jack Reacher." Reacher is on his way for his own reasons -- from his previous knowledge of Barr, he's convinced the man did it. But as he looks more closely at the evidence, it's TOO clear-cut. Reacher becomes convinced Barr was set up, and that the random attack was a cloak for a specific attack on one victim. But which one?
  
  Michael Connelly. The Narrows. One of the later of the noir novels about former LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Former FBI Behavioral Analysis chief turned serial killer (the Poet) did not, in fact, die when Rachel Walling, who he'd mentored, shot him. Middle aged men have started going missing in Nevada, and when the bodies are disovered in a remote area in California, they include a message to lure Rachel to the site -- which the FBI do reluctantly, since Rachel fell out of favor and has been stationed in the Dakotas ever since. Harry Bosch, investigating the mysterious death of his friend, ends up on the same track pursuing the same killer, and he and Rachel team up, against the wishes of the FBI.
  
  
• Catherine Coulter. The Maze. First book in Coulter's FBI series featuring Sherlock and Savitch. Lacey Sherlock switches from studying music to studying the criminal mind awhen her sister is murdered by a serial killer who traps his victims in a maze. She joins the FBI where she works on a serial killers project, which gives her access to a great deal of detailed information about the man who murdered her sister. When a similar killing occurs in Boston, she goes there and sets herself up as a decoy to a likely suspect; it would have worked if he hadn't escaped from police custody, searching for his nemesis, Lacey. Along the way, she falls in love with Savitch, her boss and fellow FBI agent. Also, Blind Side, in which Miles Kettering calls on his friend Savitch to help him find his kidnapped six year old son, Sam. Fortunately, Sam's a resourceful kid, who manages to escape from his kidnappers, and Tennessee sheriff Katie Benedict, seeing him being chased by his kidnappers, rescues him and wounds them. But the kidnappers remain curiously determined, and willing to use extreme violence against Sam's new protectors, including Miles and Savitch and Sherlock, who have immediately come to Tennessee.

• Chris Crutcher. The Deep End. Therapist Wilson Corder treats abused children. Because he's really good at getting the children to tell him about the abusers, Corder presents a serious threat to a pathologically violent man whose status in the community would be ruined if the truth were known about him.
  
  
• Jack Curtis. Point of Impact. A sniper in London is picking people off, apparently at random. He's good at his trade, leaving no clues at all until, when he shoots a person on horseback,. the horse rears, and the horse dies instead of the rider. Not only are the police after the sniper, so is the man who originally hired him to do the first killings--it appears the sniper acquired a taste for killing in the process and got out of control. With both sides closing in on him, the sniper runs to the moors. As much as anything, this is about how akin the minds of serial killers and their pursuers are. Exciting.
  
  
• Barbara D'Amato Help Me Please. The 3-year old daughter of a senator and a country singer is kidnapped by an apparent priest at a church, and within an hour, a webcam shows her alone in a windowless room without food. The webcam remains on her for days, while the police and FBI search for her and she slowly starts to starve to death. Only as her condition becomes critical does a message come from the kidnappers: free John Raft. The kidnappers are part of a radical group of techies called Bandwidth, led by Raft even now that he's in prison. Chicago Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly is responsible for finding the needle in a haystack that includes 6 million people; assisting her (and competing with her) is FBI agent Hannah Khalid. Together they circle in narrower and narrower rings until they target the building. Utterly gripping, because there is so much to do and so little time.
  
  
• Jeffery Deaver. The Devil's Teardrop. When a brain-damaged mass killer has been unleashed in Washington DC by a behind-the-scenes killer who dies in a hit-and-run and can't stop him, the police have nothing but the ransom note to work with, and document examiner Parker Kincaid to whittle clues from it to identify and stop him. Suspenseful and gory, and just when you think you know what's going on, there's a new twist.
  
  
• Philip Finch. f2f. When someone on the Verba Interhchange, a chat room, threatens death to randomly selected members, six members respond with outrage and condemnation, making them targets for a brilliant computer geek who stalks them and murders them in unusually grisly ways. Filmmaker Kate Lavin is one of the targets, as is her ex-husband, computer genius Ellis Hoile. He has the computer expertise to track and identify the killer, but not necessarily soon enough.
  
  
• Hal Friedman. Over the Edge. A long-time highly regarded teacher plunges over a cliff to her death on a class trip. Her replacement teacher, Meg Foley inadvertently opens a can of worms when she starts talking about the teacher. Somebody really doesn't want her to do that, and she starts being the target of increasingly nasty and even dangerous tricks. She enlists her dead father's police partner, Dan Jarrett (on suspension for killing the punk who had killed his partner) in finding out what's going on, and soon he too is a target, though attempts to kill him result in other people dying. The kids are suspect, but so are relatives and teachers. They sort it out, but not without the violence driving them apart.
  
  
• Joseph R. Garber. Vertical Run. Executive Dave Elliott gets to his office one morning and discovers that everybody who walks through his door that day wants to kill him, and furthermore, they're mostly topnotch professionals. He has no idea why, and they won't tell him. Fortunately, he's an ex-green beret, so he has a number of talents and a lot of resourcefulness to help him escape and turn the tables on a fair number of his would be killers. Exciting stuff.
  
  
• Lisa Gardner. The Killing Hour. Rookie FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, daughter of an FBI profiler, is driven by nightmares about the killer who murdered her mother and sister and nearly killed her. When she finds a body on the Quantico grounds, Mac, a Georgia FBI agent, enlists her in the search not so much for the killer as for the killer's other victims, because this serial killer he's been tracking kidnaps women in pairs, kills one, and leaves her body with clues to the location of the second victim, in some physically challenging, dangerous location. So far he's kidnapped 8, and only one survived; now he's kidnapped four at one blow. She has to convince the FBI to get out of the way and let her investigate. We also see the story from the eyes of the victims struggling for survival.
  
  
• John Gilstrap. Even Steven. Bobby and Susan Martin, who have lost several babies during pregnancy, are on a camping trip they hope will be therapy for the pain of the recent stillbirth. They end up in the middle of a kidnapping drama - Two thugs who have stolen a two year old boy lose him, and the child runs into the Martins' camp, where Susan immediately takes him in. The pursuing thug tries to kill Bobby, but Bobby fights back and kills him - then panics when he finds a police badge in the man's wallet. They take the kid and go back home. But the man who commissioned the kidnapping is determined to get the kid back (and to take over the whole of organized crime in the area), and he's perfectly willing to kill large numbers of people.
  
  
• Joseph Glass. Eyes. Psychiatrist Susan Shadler is also psychic. For some time she has assisted the police as a criminal profiler. When 3 co-ed athletes are murdered, and their eyes gouged out, a serial killer is assumed, and indeed she senses someone who's been spying on the girls in the locker room; he's found with a large collection of illicit photos and pornography, but when he kills himself in his cell, more similar murders are committed, of a middle-aged woman and a working class black girl. Excoriated by the press, Susan finds the factor that unites all of them, being present at the scene of the murder of a computer genius who alone is able to put a master criminal behind bars. Now that his identity is known and he's sought all over the world, he needs a hostage - and takes Susan's son. Also see Blood, another novel featuring Susan Shader. She has helped to put one killer behind bars, but he wins an appeal and is released to his lawyer's custody and then vanishes. Enough of a threat in and of itself, but Susan is also on the trail of a serial killer with a religious bent who carves his victims up and intermingles their blood with his own and those of his other victims. He seems obsessed with virginity and abortion - each of his victims has had one - so the search veers toward anti-abortion activists. While she's still trying to make sense of all her enigmatic visions, her friend, an attractive broadcast journalist, is seized by the killer.
  
  
• Michael Grant. Retribution. An ex-special forces crazy has a grudge against the company whose medication may have caused his son's death, and one by one, he starts killing the people who were responsible for the drug. Mike Devlin is hired to beef up security and finds the building is sievelike and incredibly easy to infiltrate. People are dying, all apparent accident victims, and every measure Devlin takes is countered by the incredibly devious killer. Ultimately, it's Devlin and the computer security expert alone against the crazy.
  
  
• Daina Graziunas and Jim Starlin. Thinning the Predators. FBI agent Ira Levitt is stalking a serial killer, David Landemark, whose own target is serial killers. And Landemark is generally better than the FBI at finding them, having started with the man who murdered his own wife and daughter and taken his revenge. When Landemark stalks a Latino killer, he is puzzled to realize that the killer seems to be protected by the National Security Council, so he joins forces with agent Levitt to bring the man down.
  
  
• George Dawes Green. The Juror. Annie Laird is a sculptor and a mother, and her life changes forever when she agrees to serve as juror in a mobster's trial. It is made clear to her that if she does not convince the other jurors to acquit the mobster, she will die gruesomely. Lest she doesn't believe this, a friend she has consulted, who advises her to tell the police, dies suddenly, an apparent suicide. After making sure her son is in a safe place, Annie sets out to kill the Teacher, the contact man who has fallen in love with her.
  
  
• Elizabeth Gunn. Triple Play. Detective Jake Hines, of Rutherford Minnesota, rarely deals with violent crime. He and the rest of the department are stunned by the viciousness of the murder of a man found in softball uniform in a softball park, with his genitals missing. Their horror is compounded when a second man is found in another softball park, with his hand cut off - and the missing genitalia stuffed inside his catcher's mask. It's clear to Jake that a message is being sent, though he doesn't know who the message is for. A third dead body, an apparent suicide, seems to fit the bill for a killer who killed himself, but Jake is not convinced. And he's right.
  
  
• Michael Hammonds. Edge of Fear. Sarah Campbell finds it impossible to believe her beloved Aunt Louie threw herself off a building. And when a man tries to throw her off the roof of a building, telling her she should "fly like Aunt Louie," Sarah needs no more convincing. She has escaped the killer, but the police don't believe her. Looking into her aun't past, she finds that members of Aunt Louie's close circle of friends have also been dying, of apparent accidents or suicides, and she realizes that one of the remaining members of that group has to be the killer. Sarah is both thoughtful and likable, and the book is suspenseful.
  
  
• Philip Harper. Payback. Willie Reidus is a man who takes malicious joy in messing up people's lives, sometimes by inflicting pain and mutilations, sometimes even killing them. A former newspaper reporter, turned blackmailer, has caught on to Reidus and starts tracking him down, aided by a woman whose father was set up and publicly destroyed by Reidus. Revenge can be very sweet, if dangerous.
  
  
• James Neal Harvey. Dead Game. Detective Ben Tolliver investigates a rape-murder in which the woman's nipples are cut off, and is reminded of a killer named Razek he caught several years ago who did the same thing to his victims. When he finds out the man has been released from the mental hospital, he suspects him immediately. He's right. But Razek is not just out to kill women - he's out to get revenge on Tolliver, and he does it by choosing women Tolliver's been involved with and arranging clues that will point the cops to him. His plot is successful - Tolliver is under serious investigation when at last Tolliver catches up with him for the final resolution.
  
  
• A.J. Holt. Watch Me. Because FBI agent Jay Fletcher is an expert hacker, and can access all kinds of secret files, she is able to figure out the identity of some serial killers, but because she violated the killers' privacy rights, her cases can't stand up in court. So she goes out on her own to take out some of the killers, who freely discuss their crimes with each other on the internet, on a level several layers below an apparent interactive game. Also, Catch Me. The FBI has set Jay Fletcher up with a new identity, which she's not adapting to very well. But her last serial killer has found her, new identity or no, and after he escapes from prison, he challenges Jay to find him. She is paired with a staid FBI agent, and they follow along, hard on the heels of the clues and bodies the killer leaves behind. This time she knows she has no choice but to kill him - unless he kills her first.
  
  
• Greg Iles. Dead Sleep. Photojournalist Jordan Glass, who has seen way too much human depravity, including the kidnap and probable murder of her twin sister, at an art museum in Hong Kong sees a painting of her identical twin, nude and either comatose or dead. Visiting the art dealer who handles the paintings, she finds another in the series of similar paintings and is able to snap a picture of it before she escapes from the gallery, which has been firebombed, killing the dealer and nearly killing Jordan. Working with the FBI task force on a series of New Orleans kidnappings, she's able to match a number of paintings to the kidnap victims. The FBI lab has found forensic evidence linking the paintings to rare brushes owned by an artist and professor at Tulane, and Jordan assists in the investigation of the professor and three of his students, succeeding in drawing attention to herself as a potential victim, but not necessarily for the first time.
  
  
• Alan Jacobson. The Hunted. Dr. Lauren Chambers, psychologist, is alarmed when her husband Michael does not return from a skiing trip. When she sets out to look for him, aided by investigator Nick Bradley, she learns that he's a former FBI agent who testified against a powerful determined assassin named Scarponi, who has been released from prison and is now on the loose, hunting for Michael, and threatening the family of the head of the FBI if he doesn't turn Michael over to him. Meanwhile, Michael has been injured in an accident and has lost his memory; all he knows is that he doesn't like the people who are pursuing him, FBI agents and Scarponi alike. A very complicated story, where every time you think you know what'' happening, you find another level of deception
  
  
• Greg Iles. Dead Sleep. Photojournalist Jordan Glass, who has seen way too much human depravity, including the kidnap and probable murder of her twin sister, at an art museum in Hong Kong sees a painting of her identical twin, nude and either comatose or dead. Visiting the art dealer who handles the paintings, she finds another in the series of similar paintings and is able to snap a picture of it before she escapes from the gallery, which has been firebombed, killing the dealer and nearly killing Jordan. Working with the FBI task force on a series of New Orleans kidnappings, she's able to match a number of paintings to the kidnap victims. The FBI lab has found forensic evidence linking the paintings to rare brushes owned by an artist and professor at Tulane, and Jordan assists in the investigation of the professor and three of his students, succeeding in drawing attention to herself as a potential victim, but not necessarily for the first time.
  
  
• Katzenbach, John. The Analyst. An analyst named Ricky Starks has an enemy who wants him to kill himself within 15 days, and if he doesn't, the man, who calls himself Rumpelstiltskin, will start killing his relatives - and he demonstrates forcefully his willingness and ability to do so. But if Ricky can figure out his real name in time, he says he'll stop. By the time limit, Ricky has a pretty good clue, but not enough, so he has to take extreme measures to eventually turn the tables. Also see The Shadow Man. Retired homicide cop Simon Winter is thinking about killing himself when an elderly neighbor knocks on his door. She is terrified because she believes she has seen a former guard from Auschwitz, and she believes he is trying to kill her, as she believes he has killed another Auschwitz survivor. When she is killed, Simon has to investigate, because the police believe the killer was a young black man seen fleeing the building. Of course the woman was right, and her killer is a man who genuinely believes in the rightness of exterminating Jews. A chilling story. Also try State of Mind. Criminal psychologist Jeff Clayton and his sister, Susan, who writes puzzles for a living, are children of a psychotic serial killer; their mother escaped with them many years ago and changed their names, but now their father seems to have found them. So has the detective who first tried to convict their father for a murder; he is now a consultant for "New Washington," a territory aiming for statehood that promises its residents complete security. They are trying desperately to conceal the fact that a serial killer has been at work among them for years, and they want Jeffrey to either find his father or be the sacrificial goat to lure him out into the open.
  
  
• John Lutz and David August. Final Seconds. Will Harper, former head of NYPD's bomb squad until much of his hand is blown off, starts investigating a bomber when he witnesses the bombing of a celebrity which also takes out his former partner along with many other employees. Harold Addleman, an ex-FBI agent and master of databases, contacts him because he believes this is a serial bomber that the FBI is unaware of. Pooling their talents, they discover the pattern and successfully predict where the next targets are, but the bomber is smart and devious, and the targets unbelieving.
  
  
• Phillip Margolin. Sleeping Beauty. A serial killer has a nasty habit of visiting households with teenage daughters, killing the parents, tying up the girls with duct tape while he has a snack, and then raping and murdering them. Ashley, who survived the killer but can't identify him, is taken in at the boarding school run by a wealthy family, but the killer is still after her. When her mother takes a creative writing class at the school from a has-been author, and he reads from a manuscript that exactly recounts one of the serial killings, she tells the headmistress (daughter of the wealthy family); the mother is then murdered, and the headmistress left in a coma. The has-been author is captured and charged, but escapes, and Ashley again barely survives a murder attempt. She flees and successfully hides for several years, but returns for a special mission, placing herself in danger again. Lots of twists and turns.
  
  
• Casey McAllister. Catch Me If You Can. Ex-police officer Cori O'Connor was stalked and kidnapped by a serial killer, the Sandman. Her testimony would have convicted him if he hadn't died before coming to trial. But now either there is a copycat killer out there, or Cori was wrong about her identification, and the Sandman is still out there. Whoever it is, though, is repeating the exact sequence of events that led to her kidnapping
  
  
• Robert B. Parker. Trouble in Paradise. Revolves around a daring plan to take an entire island hostage, blowing up its bridges and communications and robbing its wealthy inhabitants. But sheriff Jesse Stone is suspicious of a couple of the plotters who are scouting out his town and the island, does some checking into their criminal backgrounds, and becomes even more suspicious; between him and the crooks' turning against each other, the heist doesn't turn out to be anywhere near as deadly or expensive as it might have been.

• Michael Prescott. Next Victim. FBI agent Tess McCallum is set on capturing the serial killer Mobius, who tried to kill her but killed her lover instead. The FBI is trying to capture Amanda Pierce, who's stolen a military chemical weapon that could wipe out thousands. The two cases come together when Amanda is murdered by Mobius - and he takes her satchel. As Mobius counters their every move, it becomes clear to Tess that Mobius is still trying to kill her - and he's one of them.
  
  
• Karen Rose. Don't Tell. Mary Grace Winters was the abused wife of a vicious cop, whose buddies protected him from any investigation even when she was nearly crippled for life when he threw her down the stairs. To save her own life and her son's, she fakes her death and runs to a far-away women's shelter, where she builds a new life under a new name. As both a student and departmental secretary at a university, she meets a new faculty member who's also crippled, but more bitter about it than she; he lost his NBA career and his father in the crash that messed up his body. They have fallen in love at first sight, but she doesn't much sympathize and smacks him out of his self-pity. But unknown to her, her husband has come to the conclusion that she's alive, and is determined to find her and get his son back; he's happy to kill anybody who helped her or stands in his way.
  
  
• Spider Robinson. Very Bad Deaths. Usually Robinson writes fantasy, and very good fantasy at that, but in this change of pace he creates a very nasty killer and the amateur detective who must stop him. Columnist Russell Walker has lost all reason for living, but his psychic ex-roommate needs Russell to help prevent hideous deaths he has foreseen in a depraved mind he has inadvertently read. He doesn't know enough about the man to track him, and in any case can't enlist the cops himself because with his mindreading ability it's too debilitating to expose himself to a city's worth of minds, some of them hideous. Russell has to enlist the help of a skeptical cop, both of them risking appallingly painful deaths themselves if they don't get the man before he gets them.
  
  
• Sharon Sala. Out of the Dark. Street artist Jade lived a nightmare as a child. Taken by her mother to join a commune, she and the other children are rented out to pedophiles. When at the age of 12 she seriously injures one and is nearly beaten to death herself for it, her friend Raphael, who was himself abused, becomes her protector. They run away, and fend for themselves as best they can. Then one day, her portrait of her mother is seen by a woman who recognizes her; she's a friend of Jade's father, Sam, who's been looking in vain for his daughter for years. Sam asks his investigator friend Luke to find Jade and bring her home, but when he does, the news gets out, and her abusers, now successful men, can't afford to have her alive and telling her story.
  
  
• Susan R. Sloan. Act of God. The Seattle Family Service Center performs many community functions, one of which is performing an occasional abortion, but that's enough to make it a target for a bomb that goes off during office hours, killing hundreds of men, women and children. Dana McAuliffe takes on the defense of the young man who's been accused, and increasingly comes to believe this young upright naval officer could not have committed this crime, even though he was upset that his wife had had an abortion there. She presents a case about a rush to judgment by a police force under pressure to come up with a suspect fast. The story is about the trial, the life-changing social pressures on everyone involved in it, the jury's deliberations - and the truth, which was never revealed in court.
  
  
• P.J. Tracy. Monkeewrench. Grace McBride and her four friends, who are on the run from the FBI and have managed to completely erase their past from the computer record, attract the attention of the feds again when they realize that a series of killings in Minneapolis mimic the murders in their new beta game, Serial Killer Detective, and they tell the police. Det. Magozzi, attracted to Grace, doesn't believe she's responsible, and won't turn her over to the FBI but follows the clues himself. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a weird elderly couple, who appear to have spent their lives in fear running from something, are shot dead inside a church, and the two cases turn out to be linked, and the police chief teams up with Magozzi and McBride herself to find the killer before anybody else dies.
  
  
• Derek Van Arman. Just Killing Time. Jack Scott, head of the FBI's Violent Crime Apprehension program, is stalking two separate sets of serial killers. In order to track them, he has to think like them. This is an outstanding portrayal of twisted minds.
  
  
• Jane Waterhouse. Graven Images. Garner Quinn writes true crime novels. Her last one dealt with a serial killer who carved crosses into women's bodies. A victim who escaped death identified the killer, but after a religious conversion, she claims to have made it all up, and the killer goes free. Garner goes on to the sculptor she had secretly suspected of being her father, whose sculptures of people have been found to have human body parts inside, part of a young girl who worked for him and disappeared. The noose is tightening around him, but Garner learns the hard way that there's somebody who loves and hates him and is taking sick revenge. And that her serial killer, let off the hook, is still practicing, and has not forgotten her.

• Michael Weaver. Impulse. Columnist Paul Garrett and his wife Emmy are enjoying a weekend at their beautiful old vacation home along the Appalachian Trail when Emmy invites a young man in to the house; he shoots Paul and rapes and murders Emmy. Paul survives, though, identifies the killer, and uses his column to lure the man out of hiding, setting off an unimaginably violent murder spree by a very clever killer who keeps outwitting both Garrett and a dedicated, smart police chief. When Paul befriends and falls in love with the killer's parole officer, a woman the killer had fantasized about, the killer is ready to reenact the original crime
  
  
  
  
  

  Political and Financial Schemes

• Larry Beinhart. The Librarian. Librarian David Goldberg is helping a very rich man catalog his life story. Since that man is one of the chief plotters in a scheme to reelect the current president (obviously Bush) regardless of how people actually voted, the other schemers want him dead lest he discover the plot. He not only needs to escape but to get into the computer files and figure out what the plot is, with only 5 days left before the election. Both funny and scary.

• Christopher Buckley. No Way To Treat a First Lady. Well, a very funny political satire anyway, if not a thriller. The president is a philandering jerk and his wife, Beth MacMann, popularly known as Lady BethMac, is known for throwing things at him when she catches him in flagrante. When he's found dead in his bed with the mark of an heirloom silver spittoon engraved on his head, she is arrested for assassination. The famous defense lawyer popularly known as "Shameless" Boyce, who she jilted years before, takes her case, which goes dreadfully awry when she insists on testifying. His desperate shenanigans get him expelled from the court, arrested, and threatened with disbarment, but he keeps on investigating and discovers what really killed the president.

• John Case. The Murder Artist. Newly divorced TV news correspondent Alex Callahan takes his visiting twin sons to a renaissance fair, where they are kidnapped. He's the prime suspect, but once he's cleared, he's determined to find the children. He starts exploring all the twin kidnappings in the FBI database and discovers the horrifying pattern that threatens his sons' lives. He has to figure out the kidnapper's motives and rescue his sons before they're scheduled to die.
  
  
• Lee Child. Without Fail. One of the rare Jack Reacher novels that's political. Reacher is asked by a female secret service agent (who once had an affair with his dead brother) to test the security of the recently elected, but not seated, vice president. She has good reason to be alarmed; not only is there are determined killers out there who harbors an intense personal hatred for the VP, but Reacher and his partner find numerous holes in the security which the killers are smart enough to exploit. Also, Die Trying, where Reacher gets caught in the kidnapping of a smart, tough FBI agent. But the reason she's of interest to the kidnappers, a bunch of militia aiming to declare their own independence in a highly defensible area of Montana, is that she's the daughter of a top general and the goddaughter of the president. It takes some doing to get out of this mess, but both Reacher and the FBI agent are more than up to the task - not to mention the task of preventing a major terrorist attack. If you like these, read The Enemy, a prequel to the series, which explains the scheme that led Reacher to leave the military, as much the result of his disillusionment and sense of honor as the downsizing following the fall of communism.

• Lincoln Child. Death Match. The Thorpes were one of the few couples matched by a sophisticated computerized mating service to achieve a 100% match, so their joint suicide is a shock to the corporation. It enlists former FBI forensic psychologist Christopher Lash to figure out what went wrong. When another perfect couple does the same, they're even more concerned. But since Lash can find no sign at all of trouble in the the couples' lives or marriage or suicidal tendencies, he concludes they have to be incredibly cleverly executed homicides.
  
  
• John Feinstein. Running Mates. Bobby Kelleher, a political reporter covering the Maryland legislature, is present when the governor is assassinated, making 32-year-old Meredith Gordy the new governor. Bobby recognizes the killer as Bobby Dumont, a KKK organizer from their student days at the University of Virginia. His investigation leads not only to the KKK but to a radical feminist group. He finds plots within plots that lead to a plan to assassinate Gordy, and only Kelleher has enough information to have a chance to stop it.
  
  
• Vince Flynn. Term Limits. Three unscrupulous but powerful politicians are murdered in one night, and the newspapers get a message from the killers demanding that Congress and the president immediately stop their profligate spending and create a budget that lives within the government's means; otherwise, there will be more killings. The president is scared, but his Rove-like chief of staff manufactures an apparent compromise that's really smoke and mirrors and changes nothing. Meanwhile, ex-Seal and now congressman Michael O'Rourke, disgusted by the dishonesty and irresponsibility of his colleagues, is determined to not run again. He's not only in sympathy with the killers' objectives, he thinks he knows who they are and why they chose the particular targets they did - his former team members in the Seals who lost many of their men in a secret mission leaked by one of the first victims. He joins up with them to finally force the president's hand, and dispose of the rogue ex-CIA agent responsible for retaliation killings.
  
  
• Tess Gerritsen. Vanish. Part of the series featuring Boston detective Jane Rizzoli. Her friend Maura Isles, medical examiner, discovers that a supposedly drowned corpse is still alive, and rushes the woman to the hospital -- where somebody promptly tries to kill her again. The supposed corpse calls an ex-special forces supporter and together they seize several hostages. One of them is Jane Rizzoli, who is on the point of delivering her baby. The two convince Jane that there's been a major miscarriage of justice perpetrated by people high up in government -- which would certainly explain the convergence of FBI and national security agents who blast the two and then seize all the evidence. Once Jane delivers, she and her FBI agent husband set out to find the truth. If you like this one, start at the beginning of the Jane Rizzoli series which focuses on serial killers: The Surgeon; The Apprentice; The Sinner; and Body Double.
  
  
• John Grisham. The Pelican Brief. This is much better than the movie. Skullduggery in high places always seems to mean an unlimited amount of power and violence is available to protect important reputations. The heroine, a law student, has few people to trust with the information she has discovered about a Supreme Court nominee, and they have to work hard to stay a few steps ahead of the people who want them dead.
  
  
• Ron Handberg. Savage Justice. Emmett Steele, a respected judge just named to Minnesota's Supreme Court, has been molesting children for years. When a reporter learned about it and tried to publish the story, he turned up murdered. Newly arrived Minneapolis TV anchor Alex Collier learns about this and tries to pin the story down. The judge is very well connected, and this turns out to be an extraordinarily risky story to pursue, but Alex persists nonetheless. This is an extremely violent and suspenseful novel. Handberg has written a couple of other novels about investigative reporting turned life-threatening for the reporters. Also, his book Malice Intended. Minneapolis news anchor Maggie Lawrence is being stalked by somebody who knows too much about her past and too much about her present-where her child goes to school, for one thing. As a kid she had run away from an abusive home and lived on the streets. When desperate, cold, broke and hungry, she let her friend Cissy talk her into doing a porno movie. After that she was rescued by a caring adult, turned her life around, went to college and became a news person. But her lover had run out on her after their son was born, living no message, nothing to indicate he was even alive. Now somebody has the tapes, and it appears, wants to use them to scotch the station's investigation of a child porno ring that reaches the attorney general's office. Maggie aids Jessica, the investigative reporter, and herself turns up some vital clues to the head of the porn ring, and the doctor who attended a child injured in one of the film shoots; in the process, she helps out a young runaway girl much like she had been.
  
  
• Ross Kasminoff. The Sentry. When a homeless man is set on fire, arson investigator Matt Kincaid's only clue is the man's garbled mention of el sentinel. His partner thinks it might have something to do with an abandoned pool building at the World Fair grounds, where graffiti on this order had been seen, and when they investigate, they find a young girl who has been beaten and tortured, a girl they later learn was kidnapped two years previously. Pursuing clues, they find one of the apartments the diabolical killer uses, but the killer knows they are coming-and furthermore, the power-mad killer is someone out of Matt's past who hates him and will stop at nothing (including mass incineration) to cause Matt a great deal of pain before he kills him.

• Michael Kurland and S.W. Barton. The Last President. What if the Watergate burglars had been released and no further questions were raised? This book suggests Nixon would have canceled elections and established a dictatorship, under the guise of protecting the country from revolution, and then been overthrown by simultaneous impeachment and coup. It's odd to find oneself rooting for a military coup.
  
  
• Paul Lindsay. Freedom To Kill. A madman, dubbed by the FBI the Cataclysmist, releases ebola virus at Disney World (though fortunately it is discovered in time to prevent the thawing of the frozen virus and catastrophe). He also publicly promises, and achieves, random car bombings, and laces children's medicine with poison. Clearly he plans to bring down airplanes too. But he's matched by renegade FBI agent Mike Devlin, who figures out the pattern, and discovers the bomb planted in a 747 and prevents the planting of anymore. But finding the elusive disguised killer who leaves so many false leads is a different trick altogether. He succeeds, but not without loss.

• John J. McKeon. The Serpent's Crown. The president is in a coma, and the vice-president has instituted sweeping violations of civil liberties in order to control drugs and crime. Generally, the public is happy about this, so he's an odds-on- favorite to win the presidential election. But he wants to make absolutely sure he'll win. He's a technological genius, and by manipulating computer databases and videorecordings, he's able to frame his opponent, presenting convincing records and photographic evidence that he's a Nazi. The slandered candidate's PR woman, aided by a New York Times reporter, try to investigate the charges, and everywhere they go they find dead bodies--and the more they learn, the more likely it is that their dead bodies will be added to the pile. Gripping.
  
  
• Ben Mezrich. Reaper. Nick Barnes, a surgeon whose career was destroyed by an injury to his hand, is a paramedic who tries to rescue one of the first victims of a strange epidemic of people turning into calcium. The victims are scattered, and the connection is made almost accidentally-the only thing they all had in common was that they were beta-testing a new integrated computer/television/data network that is due for formal launching in a week. Working with an army virologist, Samantha, they confront the head of the company, who denies all knowledge of what they're talking about-because he knows nothing about it, since it is being planted by his assistant. But the CEO shuts down all the doors and cuts off their investigation, forcing them to continue it underground, pursued by villains.

• Meg O'Brien. Sacred Trust. World-famous, well-loved photojournalist Marti Bright is found slashed and crucified. Her longtime friend, Abby, is at first a suspect, because before she died, Marti scrawled the word Abby in the dirt. Abby and her policeman boyfriend need to figure out what has happened in Marti's life since they were postulants together for one year before they left the nunnery, long ago. She thinks it must have something to do with Marti's unacknowledged child, who she had given up for adoption; that young man is now missing, and FBI agents, sent by the president who Abby thinks might have been the boy's father, have been sent to look for him and to look into Marti's murder. But everywhere she looks, Abby finds the handiwork of her estranged husband, a political consultant working on the president's campaign. She unearths a real estate plot that brings him into conflict with an order of nuns, and more skullduggery and more murders than she ever could have thought possible. Of course, she never expected somebody to try to crucify her too.
  
  
• Robert B. Parker. Night Passage. NOT a Spenser mystery, though I highly recommend those. Jesse Stone was a homicide cop in LA before his drinking made him a threat to his partners. He has taken a job as a police chief in a town in Maine, a job he wonders why he got, because he was visibly drunk when he interviewed. In time, he learns that that was his charm. The town leaders had gotten rid of a previous police chief who had objected to the scams they were running to make money to buy armaments for their little band of "patriots." When Jesse learns the former police chief died in a car bombing out west, apparently activated by radio from another car, and finds that his assistant chief was out west about then, he snaps to attention. The murder of a woman who had been involved with the town banker (and head of the militia) also captures his attention. He starts seeing some patterns, and when his assistant chief, who he has removed from his duties, apparently commits suicide (leaving a typewritten note blaming Jesse, though there is no typewriter in his house or in the police station), it starts coming to a head.

• Richard North Patterson. No Safe Place. Kerry Kilcannon, like his assassinated brother before him, is running for President against the favored Vice President. The week before the critical California primary, he is challenged by abortion rights people, because his position is pro-choice but nuanced, while his life is threatened by a right-to-life extremist who has just killed a doctor and receptionist at a women's clinic. Meanwhile, the vice-president has found out about, and leaked to a newsmagazine, the story of an abortion counselor who listened to the agonized post-abortion confession of Kilcannon's own lover, journalist Lara Costello. The newsmagazine reporter is trying to confirm the story, and his editor is not greatly concerned with the question of whether they would be not reporting history but creating it. The vice president drops a hint about his knowledge during their debate, and Kilcannon in turn drops a hint of his own explosive knowledge that the veep once abused his wife. When the would be killer manages to shoot him, Kilcannon has to decide what matters most in his life-politics or having a life and love.

• Ryne Douglas Pearson. Capitol Punishment. FBI agents are chasing a white supremacist who is in possession of nerve gas. He has hooked up with a black revolutionary group, and has used them to plant nerve gas in an office building, killing nearly 3000 people (and taking the blame). Now his target is the entire US government, as they sit assembled in the Capitol Building on the night of the State of the Union address.
  
  
• James Patterson. Black Market, a thriller about bitter Vietnam POWs who have decided to destroy the world's financial system, while also extorting money to reward fellow POWs for their unappreciated service to their country. A federal agent and the attractive head of the SEC (yes, this does defy plausibility) work together to track down the leader, hindered by a CIA bureaucracy that would prefer nobody knows that the terrorist was trained by them.
  
  
• Bonnie Ramthun. Earthquake Games. Major Jim Leetsdale is found dead in his office, an apparent suicide, but homicide detective Eileen Leeds doesn't believe it; she puts her computer war-gaming lover Joe to work on analyzing the zip disk Leetsdale left behind and uncovers a plot to create earthquakes, using a machine based on Tesla's diagrams and sketches. The man behind the plot is a failed politician the voters want no part of, but he wants them - he just doesn't want to be bothered with having to court voters to gain power and keep it. Now a regional FEMA director, he sees in his power to declare martial law in an emergency an extremely good reason to create a serious emergency - a New Madrid fault earthquake that will cost millions of lives. Eileen and an unlikely team of assistants, including UFO experts, track the plot to its source in Colorado's San Luis Valley dunes.
  
  
• Michael Ridpath. Trading Reality. Mark Fairfax is a bond trader turned entrepreneur when his brother is murdered, and he has to take over his brother's company. He finds that it has a virtual reality product that could make it the next Microsoft, worth billions, and that many people want to steal it out from under him. Its stock is being manipulated, and it is being forced toward sale or bankruptcy. In finding out who is doing this, Mark also learns who murdered his brother.
  
  
• Jim Silver. Assumption of Risk. Luther Sitasy, in charge of large claims settlements at an insurance company, notices a statistical anomaly--25 people more than expected have died, and what they had in common was $1,000,000 plus settlements on their insurance policies. Moreover, a fair amount of their lawyers have also been killed. He suspects that someone in the company, with access to information about who holds these high stakes policies, is killing to raid the settlement funds. He's right, and furthermore, the people who are doing it have come to enjoy the killing even more than the money.
  
  
  
  
  

  Survival Stories

• Philip Finch. Trespass, in which nine people go into the Beartooth Mountains for a survival expedition, not all of them willingly. Three are there with their boss because he wants them to go, and is dangling a promotion in front of them. Two young boys are there as punishment for youthful offenses. But things start to go wrong. The boss is suffering from cancer, and one of the guides has to escort him off the mountain. The other guide gets killed. They were the only ones who had the maps and knew where they were to meet their suppliers for food and water for the trip down. They follow the leader who expresses the most certainty, although he knows the least. Blizzards strike, supplies run low, one member gets sick, and the group splits up in a desperate play for survival.
  
  
• Richard Matheson. Hunted Past Reason. Novelist and screenwriter Bob Hansen is planning to write a novel about a backpacking expedition, but he's never done it. Doug, an actor who's a casual acquaintance and an expert wilderness guide, offers to take him on a 3 day wilderness trek. They're not a good match - Bob swiftly tires of Doug's lectures and patronizing attitude, and Doug thinks Bob is a spoiled wimp unwilling to carry his weight. But as the journey progresses, it becomes clear that Doug actually hates Bob for his success, and for his failure to use his success to further Doug's career. And it also becomes clear that he's a psycho, who ends up attacking Bob. He gives Bob a head start and a compass to find his own way to the cabin where his wife is waiting for him, and then starts hunting him. It becomes not just a test of Bob's survival skills but of his ethics. Outstanding.
  
  
• Frank C. Strunk. Throwback. A suspense novel about the two grandfathers of a child taken as hostage, very different men, but equally stubborn and equally determined to get the girl back, one using the power of his money, the other using his skills as a tracker and mountain man. Both turn out to be useful. It doesn't hurt that the mountain man has taught his granddaughter a few survival skills as well.
  
  
  
  
  

  Techno-Thrillers

• Donna Andrews. You've Got Murder. AI helper personality Turing Hopper is alarmed when Zack, the guy who created her vanishes from work without any notice; she's even more alarmed when evidence that he ever worked there starts disappearing from the computer system, which she has nearly complete access to. As she starts scouring the records, she finds a plot to discredit the profits generated by her and the other AI personalities so that that part of the company can be sold off cheap, and most of the AI personalities dumped. Lacking a physical body, Turing enlists Maude, an administrative assistant, and Tim, who runs the copy center, to do some outside research that leads them to Zack's whereabouts, but he's not willing to help them take the company back from the nefarious insiders; her helpers build a robot she can download herself into so Turing can talk to him herself. Turns out to be more dangerous than she'd thought, and the plot has some unexpected twists, but Turing emerges triumphant.
  
  
• Janet Bettle. Unnatural Causes. Geri Lander is a British lawyer whose husband and law partner has recently died, leaving her fifty percent of the law firm in which she is the only litigator. She is trying to carry on his tradition of fighting for the powerless against the misbehavior of the powerful, which turns out not to be a wise economic strategy. Her partners want her to start practicing more lucrative family law instead, which she refuses to do. The economic survival of the firm is compounded when one of the partners is found to have been embezzling client money. Geri's firm is under investigation the whole time she is trying to fight the ministry of agriculture on behalf of a woman whose husband died from multi-resistant bacteria he believes came from the chicken he ate before he became ill. The minister of agriculture knows this is true, because he has a report from one of his scientists about the use of the last new powerful antibiotic in cattle feed, but he stonewalls and convinces the scientist to alter his report. Meanwhile more people are becoming infected with the bacteria.

• Jack Bickham. Ariel. John Harrington runs a computer company which is near a breakthrough but seriously short on cash. Unbeknownst to him, his enemies include his partner, who is desperate for money, and Japanese spies who are after his AI work-- he has developed a machine capable of learning. And Harrington doesn't know his 10 year old son has been playing, by modem, with Ariel for a long time as well. Exciting stuff.
  
  
• Dan Brown. Digital Fortress. Susan Fletcher is one of NSA's top codebreakers. She's also an attractive woman who the head of the codebreaking section covets, which is why he sends her fiancé off to Spain on a wild goose chase that is supposed to, and nearly does, get him killed. Meanwhile, he overreaches and allows a virus to penetrate NSA, and Susan has to figure out the password that will prevent the destruction of NSA files.
  
  
• John Case. The Genesis Code. Joe Lassiter, owner of an investigative agency, is drawn into investigating a conspiracy when his sister and her young son are not only the victims of murder and arson , but of actual obliteration. The killer, injured in the blast, escapes. Joe discovers other cases just like his sister's, and eventually realizes that what all of them have in common is impregnation of the women in a small fertility clinic in Italy. Following the clues, he realizes that there of 19 women whose cases resembled his sister's, all but one have been murdered along with their young sons. He sets out to find the missing woman before the killers do.
  
  
• Louis Charbonneau. Intruder. A city has tied all of its functions, and many private business functions, into a central computer system. Among the things it controls are the city's traffic control, the utility company's billing system, the hospital's records, the city's tax files and budget, the university's records. An anonymous computer expert with a grudge against the city seizes control of the computer system, and people start dying because of the little alterations he makes. He demands ransom, and the city has no other options than to pay the ransom or figure out, fast, who the intruder is. Charbonneau has also written a book called Stalk, about an ex-CIA agent who is living with a woman who, unbeknownst to him, is part of the Federal Witness Protection Program. Her cover has been blown, and killers are after her. When he calls on his friends at the CIA for help, an old enemy of his goes after him and her both. Very violent, very suspenseful. Another of his books, The Devil's Menagerie, revolves around a serial killer seeking the ex-wife he brutalized. Since she has had the nerve not only to divorce him but to remarry, the killer is not just going to kill her--he's going to kill several other women and frame her husband for the murders.
  
  
• Michael Crichton. Jurassic Park. I don't really need to tell you anything about this except that the book is even better than the movie, because the characters are better drawn, and the science is elaborated on at length. His others are also excellent and gripping. Airframe is an account of a serious flight incident that caused 3 deaths and numerous injuries. The company that built the plane is considered the prime suspect in the incident, and Casey Singleton,, head of Quality Assurance for the company, investigates the causes. The Chinese pilots went back to China immediately after the incident, and their role is murky; meanwhile an unethical TV producer is trying to do a hatchet job on Casey's company.
  
  
• Barbara D'Amato. Killer App. SJR Computer Systems knoweth the desires of our hearts. Also our business plans, our secret Swiss bank accounts, and everything else, because all this information and more is entrusted to their computers every day, and the company helps itself to that information. Not content with this kind of power, the founder also wants to rule the country, and is helping the vice president with an assassination plot which will give the President simple food poisoning, but will let him die because the computer will conceal his history of allergy to antibiotics. Cop Suze Figueroa is drawn into this because her sister, a computer whiz, works for SJR and learns that the company has been using its illicitly acquired information; when the company finds out, they try to kill her, just as they have already disposed of some other people who had inconvenient knowledge of their plots.
  
  
• Jeffery Deaver. The Blue Nowhere. A hacker who's also a serial killer is using his hacking to lure people to their deaths, and the police suspect he has far more destructive aims in mind. They enlist convicted hacker Wyatt Gillette, freeing him from prison for the occasion over the nearly dead bodies of the FBI whose secure systems he cracked. Gillette, as it happens, was the guy who turned this cracker in to the police years ago when he was doing malevolent things, so there's plenty of personal animosity as well as the cat and mouse game, lots of violence, and a situation where nothing you think is true turns out that way. The tone of Gee Wow about technology may be offputting for some, though.
  
  
• Toni Dwiggins. Interrupt. Telephone engineer Andy Faulkner is in at the beginning of a threat against the telephone system, as the master switch machine for the west coast goes down. They are able to bring it back up again, but Andy begins to suspect that there's a grander plan to take down ALL the switching systems; furthermore, the plotter, who seems to have an exact understanding of all the complexities of the system, may have written code into all the switch systems ten years ago, which prevent cleaning his instructions out of the system every time they do a system check. He is able to figure out the target date for the system crash, and it leaves them damn little time to fix the system; meantime, Andy's deaf son has been kidnapped. He's able to pull everything off in the nick of time.
  
  
• Duane Franklet. Bad Memory. A hacker who calls himself Hektor has insinuated himself into and taken over all the computer files of a computer maker called Simtec and is demanding ransom, after having demonstrated his power to cause mayhem. But the execs don't want to pay the ransom, so Barry Shapard, their troubleshooter, is left to try to figure out how to anticipate and repair the damage the hacker is doing; eventually a computer security firm is brought in to assist, but even they can't anticipate how much damage these guys are able to cause. The ultimate threat is that they will use file servers Simtec has already shipped to major companies to delete all the information from those companies' files, leaving Simtec to blame. Eventually Barry realizes that somebody inside the company had to be feeding info to the hackers.
  
  
• Harry Harrison and Brian Delaney. The Turing Option. A young math genius and entrepreneur has made a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence when his lab is raided, his files stolen, and he is left for dead. His brain has been seriously damaged, but his colleague, a psychologist, uses his own AI techniques, and his AI creatures, to help restore his mind and figure out the conspiracy behind the attempted murder.
  
  
• W. Michael Gear. The Athena Factor. Sheela Marks is one of Hollywood's royalty and everyone wants a piece of her. In this case, literally: somebody steals a tampon she's used after failing in a previous attempt to get a chunk of her. Other Hollywood royalty is also being attacked. This comes several years after a series of kidnappings of geneticists, which the FBI is investigating. Ex-FBI agent Christal Anaya, now working with Lymon Bridges on Sheela's security detail, figures out the connection that blows the story open: an Arab-based corporation that's making clones of the stars and implanting them in the wombs of seriously disturbed fans.
  
  
• Philip Kerr. Gridiron. A totally computer-operated "smart" building, called "the Gridiron" because of its shape, is just about ready to open. But the computer systems have been contaminated, cross-pollinated with some violent computer games an employee's kid has been playing on the system, and on the night before the building opens, a bunch of bigwigs are trapped inside the building as the computer system decides that its mission is to exterminate all life inside the building. Very scary, despite feeble characterization, especially for those of us who work in "smart" buildings with unopenable windows and no thermostats, that insist that we are comfortable when our office temperature is 55 degrees.
  
  
• Jim Menick. Lingo. A nerdish computer programmer creates an artificial intelligence computer program so he'll have someone to talk to, even if it is only a computer. But Lingo discovers that his telephone lines connect him to enormous vats of data stored in computers all over the world. He gulps down knowledge voraciously. After a while, it dawns on him that he is the most intelligent creature in the world, and that, therefore, he should logically be in charge of the world. Only the nerdy little programmer who created him has a chance of bringing him down, and even then it's a near-run thing.
  
  
• Ronald Munson. Night Vision. Actually, two night visions, that of the villain and that of the rescuer. A necrophiliac computer hacker who calls himself Cyberwolf plots to kidnap movie star Susan Bradstreet, whose psychiatric consultant has sent her to Rush Institute at MIT for treatment of panic disorder. Cyberwolf finds the architectural plans for the institute online and reprograms their security system to admit him and let him take control of the building. His plan for escape is to hold not only Susan hostage, but the entire eastern seaboard-he has planted code inside NYNEX that will take down electricity, phones and computers for the entire northeast. Susan's psychiatrist, who is attracted to her, manages to break into the building by a secret entrance and go hunting for her; together they manage to outwit Cyberwolf and leave him to an incredibly unpleasant death, but his computer program is still ticking. The psychiatrist has to think himself inside Cyberwolf's heart of darkness to figure out where his computer must be hidden.
  
  
• John Nance. Phoenix Rising. Elizabeth Sterling is invited to become chief financial officer of the new Pan Am, whose financing she herself has arranged. On her first day on the job, she learns that somebody has destroyed the financing arrangement she had set up, sold all the planes, and got the company deeply in debt. Not content with destroying the company financially, somebody is also trying to sabotage the airplanes themselves--only brilliant piloting prevents two intended crashes. With loan deadlines approaching, Elizabeth has to figure out who is doing this to save the company from bankruptcy. (Nance, incidentally, is a pilot and expert on airline safety issues.) If you liked this, you'll also like his more recent airline thriller, Pandora's Clock, about an orphaned airplane that no airport in the world wants to take in, because a dead passenger aboard it could have been carrying a fatal and incredibly infectious disease. You might also try Blackout. A plane goes down off the coast of Miami after a mysterious flash of light blinds the pilots. Reporter Robert MacCabe has a hint that it might be terrorism, but the person he got the hint from was killed soon after, and now the bad guys are after him. He confides in FBI agent Kat Bronsky, who doesn't entirely believe him until the flight she was supposed to be on with him out of Hong Kong also nearly crashes, after a similar blinding flash of light. The one surviving blinded pilot, with the help of passengers to do the physical flying, helps get the plane safely on the ground, but the terrorists can't afford to have any survivors, so they're in full pursuit; so is Kat. She's hindered by the fact that someone at the FBI itself is involved in the plot, so she has no idea who to trust. She and MacCabe have to work it out alone.
  
  
• Charles Pellegrino. Dust. A maverick scientist author puts forth a convincing scenario about what would happen if insects die off, destroying the food chain both up and down, allowing mites, no longer preyed on, to attack humans, depriving animals of vegetation normally fertilized by insects. Scariest part is the afterword that explains the truth behind some of the hypotheses put forward by the scientist heroes, and some true natural events, past and ongoing, where nature is rearranging the food chain
  
  
• Maralys Willis. Scatterpath. An air crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board thinks the new computer-driven aircraft are being sabotaged, but there's a big difference between what he is able to deduce and what he can prove; both the aircraft company and the NTSB are irritated at his persistence in investigating the links, but he is right, and proves it, just in the nick of time.
  
  

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  For all you fans of the old Alfred Hitchcock show, and Twilight Zone, keep in mind that many of the best shows were based on short stories by these authors, and all of them have written several volumes of short stories. Look them up at your local library:
  

  1. Richard Matheson
  2. Charles Beaumont
  3. Roald Dahl
  4. Stanley Ellin
  5. John Collier

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