The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

An eccentric genius is all that stands between the U.S. and total financial collapse in Chapman’s first-rate sequel to 2014’s The Ascendant. Garrett Reilly, who has a gift for detecting patterns, has put that talent to work in creating the Ascendant project, “an attempt to assemble a team of out-of-the-mainstream thinkers to help America fight the next generation of wars.” Though the program succeeded in thwarting a Chinese cyberattack, Garrett quit after suffering psychological and physical damage. Now his work as an investment analyst alerts him to another alarming problem—evidence of an “enormous pool of money” accumulated in a private equity exchange. Meanwhile, a hit woman murders the head of the New York Federal Reserve; she accuses Garrett of ordering the killing before taking her own life. The allegation puts him on the run and into the path of an elusive Russian crook who may be his intellectual equal. Chapman makes the battle of wits as suspenseful as a standard action thriller. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary. (Feb.)