Deep Sky

The marvelous final volume in bestseller Lee’s thriller trilogy that began with The Breach (2009) and Ghost Country (2010) opens with a bang. Covert agent Travis Chase scrambles to make sense of a missile strike on the White House that kills the U.S. president while he’s delivering a televised speech in the Oval Office. That catastrophe is but the prelude to an assault on the secret base where Chase’s obscure agency, Tangent, is housed. The base is also the location of the Breach, a way into another dimension from which strange entities enter our own. To uncover the conspiracy behind the assassination, Chase and his colleagues must dig up the truth behind a major investigation Tangent undertook during the Reagan administration, notwithstanding the disappearance of all the agency’s records. Lee, who tosses in a neat variant on time travel, smoothly combines the pulse-pounding suspense of the TV show 24 with the SF intrigues of the X-Files. Agent: Janet Reid. (Jan.)