The Bullet

Bacon can’t cure everything. That’s one of the lesser discoveries Caroline Cashion, a 37-year-old Georgetown University French literature professor, makes in this heady thriller from former NPR correspondent Kelly, her second novel after 2014’s Anonymous Sources. A life-changing revelation on her MRI—there’s a bullet she has no clue about lodged in her neck—launches the likable and normally unflappable academic, whom Jane Austen would have found a kindred spirit despite her Salma Hayek looks, into a distinctly uncharacteristic flurry of activity. She’s whisked back three decades to her childhood in Atlanta and a shocking, never-solved double homicide. En route, she finds romance with a sexy, country music–loving doctor, Will Zartman, who is so definitely not her type. Kelly pulls off the difficult feat of plotting an action-packed page-turner that remains within the bounds of believability. [em]Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine-Greenberg-Rosten Literary Agency. (Mar.) [/em]