Spies in Plain Sight

Hightower’s dynamic second novel featuring French journalist Junie Lagarde (after The Beautiful Risk) excites from the opening pages. Lagarde runs the investigative journalism website VIE, whose staff has been probing billionaire Sullivan Carr’s plan to open a bitcoin mine in the Alps, a venture that “had all the environmental impact of a coal-burning plant with none of the charm.” After VIE begins its investigation, Stéphane Morel—whose pregnant wife, Analise, is VIE’s top reporter—is handed an envelope addressed to Lagarde. It contains a poster for the movie Three Days of the Condor, which features a massacre at a research office, and contains the message “Condolences from Sullivan Carr.” When Stéphane and Lagarde rush back to VIE’s offices, they find much of the staff dead, and Analise held hostage. Lagarde vows to bring Carr to justice for the slaughter, a mission complicated by the involvements of both a shadowy secret society called the Emerald Vipers and of Lagarde’s nemesis, Madame Reynard, the head of a covert spy organization. Hightower keeps tensions high all the way to a denouement that involves a murder method so far-fetched it threatens to break the novel’s spell. Readers with a taste for high-octane action, however, are unlikely to mind. Agent: Matthew Bialer, Stanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (June)