City of the Dead

September 1, 2021

Back when he was the junior member of a CIA action team (and known as Sierra Six), Court Gentry, a.k.a. the Gray Man, helped messily eliminate a terrorist leader who now appears to be very much alive; next in Greaney's No. 1 New York Times best-selling series. In Hood's Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Transgression, the continuation of a recently launched series, Adam Hayes is asked by his CIA Black Ops program to set up a safe house and is the only survivor when the mission is blown. Dedicated to helping others after having escaped from a shadowy black box program aimed at creating assassins, Evan Smoak, a.k.a. Orphan X, has a new mission in Hurwitz's Dark Horse: rescue the kidnapped daughter of Texas drug overlord Aragon Urrea (200,000-copy first printing). In Jance's Nothing To Lose, retired police detective Beaumont is asked for help by the son of his former partner Sue Danielson, who was murdered years ago by her raging ex-husband. Johansen gives us a big, new Killer View of Jessie Mercado, a Southern California private investigator who surfaces regularly in the "Kendra Michaels" series he writes with his mother, Iris Johansen. In the Edgar Award-winning Kanon's Cold War Berlin-set The Berlin Exchange, two U.S. students and an MI5 operative are being quietly traded far from Checkpoint Charlie for physicist Martin Keller, who had been imprisoned in the UK and now wants to see his ex-wife and son--but what do the East Germans want from him? (125,000-copy first printing). Wending their way through City of the Dead, Kellerman stalwarts Alex Delaware and his buddy, Det. Milo Sturgis, discover a naked, bled-out young man in the streets and a trail of blood leading to the nearby home of sliced-up Cordelia Gannett, an internet influencer Alex knows. Multi-award-winning Northern Irish writer McKinty follows up the New York Times best-selling, Paramount Pictures-ready The Chain with The Chase, so obviously of interest that we won't even worry about the absence of plot details (150,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Mezrich's The Midnight Ride, fresh-from-prison Nick Patterson sneaks into a hotel room on an obligatory job to find his fence dead and scared-witless MIT student Hailey Gordon hiding out after having been caught counting cards; added to this mix is a U.S. history professor's discovery of an unsettling secret about the Revolutionary War (75,000-copy first printing). A domestic-thrills author with 20 Sunday Times best sellers to her name, Parks limns the unaccountable disappearance of two women--contented wife and stepmother Leigh and wealthy, newly married Kai--in cases that shouldn't be linked but seem to be in Both of You (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).

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November 1, 2021
The death of a naked man, hit early one morning by a van near the UCLA campus, kicks off bestseller Kellerman's complex 37th Alex Delaware novel (after 2021's Serpentine). Neighborhood gossip and a few blood droplets lead the police to the home of Cordelia Gannett, whom they find stabbed to death. Delaware, a consulting psychologist for the LAPD, knows the woman from a child custody case two years earlier when she claimed to be a psychologist but was exposed as a charlatan. She recently had been selling herself on the web as a relationship expert. Delaware and his friend Lt. Milo Sturgis of the LAPD search for the identity of the nude victim and delve into Gannett's past, uncovering in the process a series of other crimes, including murder. As always, Kellerman provides fascinating insight into the motivations of his damaged characters, though the plot meanders a while before coming together. Series fans will enjoy spending time with Delaware and Sturgis, but this isn't the place to start for newcomers.

December 15, 2021
Psychologist and police consultant Alex Delaware returns in another LA-based thriller. Delaware's pal, Detective Milo Sturgis, is called to a murder scene, where he finds two bodies. He's on the phone right away to Alex to ask for help. One of the murder victims--Cordi Gannett, a self-proclaimed "relationship guru""--has been brutally stabbed. The other victim, an unidentified young male, is found naked outside Cordi's house with massive head trauma. Alex has encountered Cordi before, in a custody battle in which she falsely claimed to be an expert child psychologist. But whatever feelings Alex has about the ""guru,"" he and Milo are committed to finding whoever killed her and the mystery man. Delving into Cordi's background, they discover she was a woman trying to make something of herself after a traumatic start in life. As for the male victim, after determining his identity, they learn that his background is similar to Cordi's and that he's moved to LA to escape his tragic past. As always, Kellerman produces a gripping, readable thriller that combines elements of the police procedural, murder mystery, and psychological thriller genres.

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