GOING EAST

D'Ancona's smart, riveting thriller opens with a bang when political consultant Mia Taylor, who slipped away from a family celebration to meet her boss and lover, returns to find her whole charming, upper-crust family killed in a bomb blast. An Irish terror group claims responsibility, and Mia, stunned by her loss, puts her money in trust, quits her job, abandons her lover (wily politician Miles Anderton) and takes a job at an alternative health center in London's down-and-out East End. Mia adapts to her surroundings with surprising ease, but she also begins making inquiries into the bombing. The first lead dead-ends with a dead mobster, but after the center is bombed as well, Taylor steps up her search and hits the mother lode when she learns the full implications of her brother Ben's side business as a high-tech money launderer. A reunion with Anderton reveals his duplicity and leads to one of his political rivals, and D'Ancona follows up with a gratifying ending in which Mia gets her revenge on a surprise villain. Strong plotting is the key to the book, but its heart and soul is grieving, fierce Mia and the fascinating new world in which she must forge her path. Agent, Lois Wallace. (July)

Forecast: D'Ancona, deputy editor and political columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, may lack name recognition stateside, but he's penned an ambitious thinking person's thriller that, if publicized vigorously, could see happy sales.