Readers will bite their nails to the quick long before they reach the icy rain-soaked triple climax of this hard-driving thriller, third in a series after The Broken Hearts Club
and Irresistible. The author, a savvy New York City newspaperman disguised behind a pseudonym, knows his milieu and so does his hero, NYPD detective Conrad Voort. When an old friend passes him a list of five people scattered around the nation, each having had some relationship with terrorism, Voort confronts with terrifying timeliness the same kind of violence that destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Several of the people on the list are dead "accidentally," but Voort suspects they may have been murdered. Of those still alive, Dr. Jill Towne is a beautiful physician Voort can't help falling for. Her specialty is tropical diseases, and she insists on treating a Saudi financier-turned-terrorist, Abu Bin Hussein, exiled in Afghanistan. Frank Greene, another man on the list, is a reader of Timothy McVeigh's favorite terror primer, The Turner Diaries, and is driving a truckload of fertilizer and dynamite to New York City, to explode it at a party packed with hundreds of policemen. Voort also discovers the existence of a clandestine and murderous government agency, the National Threat Assessment Agency. A former war hero, John Szeska, formerly with NTAA and now an assassin, wants the bomber; he also wants Voort. Black's timely thriller addresses questions of terrorism and government corruption with intelligence and flair. The social underpinnings never get in the way of the supercharged suspense as the novel proceeds to a flawless, slam-bang conclusion. (Aug. 28)
Forecast:Speeding off the starting block, this latest Voort thriller is already slated to become a major motion picture (produced by Mace Neufeld), and is a selection of the Literary Guild, the Doubleday Book Club and the Mystery Guild.
