Death Echo

In Lowell’s well-crafted fifth St. Kilda Consulting thriller (after Blue Smoke and Murder), Manhattan operative Emma Cross travels to Seattle, Wash., where Blackbird, a yacht purported to contain enough explosives to destroy a major U.S. city, is being offloaded from a container ship. Posing as the representative of a buyer interested in the yacht, Emma connects with MacKenzie “Mac” Durand, Blackbird’s transit captain, who’s supposed to deliver the boat to a commissioning yard in the San Juan Islands. Emma and Mac, who has a background in special ops, wind up becoming unlikely allies on a dangerous sea journey in which they find themselves succumbing to their mutual attraction. Forced into a high stakes encounter with a pair of Russian spies, they come to realize that the scope of their mission is much greater than they at first assumed. Lowell’s primary focus on espionage rather than on romance is a major change from earlier novels, albeit a pleasing one. (June)