Kick Lannigan Gets a Little Revenge: One Kick (Chelsea Cain)

One Kick by Chelsea Cain

Kit Lannigan, just seven years old, left the door open and her puppy ran out through it. The nice man driving by offered to help her find Monster… Her family didn’t see Kit again for five years. When she came back to them her name had been changed to “Beth” – and Beth was one of the most popular child pornography actresses ever known.

credit: chelseacain.com

A decade later, Kick Lannigan (she doesn’t answer to Kit for fairly obvious reasons) is every bit as damaged as one might expect of someone with her history. She’s honed her self-defense skills to a razor's edge, can shoot the eyes (or testicles) out of a target almost with her eyes closed and carries more sharp-edged items on her person than might be found in your average surgical suite. She lives on her own, with her adoptive “brother” James and the now-ancient Monster. In her free time, she obsesses about missing children.

The man who called himself John Bishop appeared on her doorstep, bearing a satellite photo of a house somewhere, the face of the most recent missing boy peering through an attic window. Kit has trust issues aplenty, and the mysterious dead-eyed Bishop does not make her decision easy – but (still heavily-armed) she accompanies him on the search. It’s a search that will take her all the way back to her life as Beth; a journey only Kick Lannigan can undertake, and one she must undertake to save a missing child.

Meet Tony McLean, Edinburgh's Finest: James Oswald's Natural Causes

Natural Causes - James Oswald

As a newly-minted Detective Inspector, Tony McLean tends to get the leavings in the homicide department, a tendency made worse by a poor relationship with the department's top cop, "Dagwood." That's probably why he's been handed a case so cold it's glacial; the mummified, mutilated body of a young girl decades past its sell-by date. Edinburgh is in the middle of a crime spree, however, and Tony somehow keeps stumbling over the latest victims. They are of a type: elderly men, socially prominent and wealthy. That's the crowd his grandmother ran with in her youth. Poor Gran, in a coma after her stroke more than a year ago...

Although the grisly murder count of prominent octogenarians mounts, McLean is drawn to the mysterious young girl who died so horrible a death. There is something strangely… evil about the circumstances. Even as his caseload mounts and his calendar fills, his personal life spins out of control with the death of his grandmother - and his inheritance of her substantial estate. 

Undeterred by good fortune and his increasing unease about a crime spree that seems to spiral about him, McLean delves into the circumstances of the mystery girl's death. What he will learn could change his life…

The Bourne Ascendancy: Nothing Ascendant About this Tripe

The Bourne Ascendancy - Eric van Lustbader

“The King is dead. Long live the King!”

With those words, the crown passes in a monarchy. In the literary world, the passage of the crown is couched in hundreds of pages of legalese and minuscule print, but – as in a monarchy – there’s no guarantee that the successor to the throne will become a beloved figure. When Robert Ludlum passed in 2001, Eric van Lustbader ascended “the Bourne Throne”; picking up the mysterious former Treadstone agent and carrying him forward…

…into a world of increasing improbability. Ludlum published only three Bourne novels over a decade, van Lustbader has pumped out a new volume annually since 2007. The frantic pace, unfortunately, has not been kind to the series. A case in point is The Bourne Ascendancy.

Weary of the spy game, the polyglot, master of disguise, master of multiple martial arts, and master of every weapon known to mankind who calls himself “Jason Bourne” has taken up a new trade, blacksmith. No, he doesn’t forge iron items with a hammer and anvil and he isn’t a farrier, either: Bourne has become a double for hire. This contract ends in a hail of gunfire, Bourne captured, the sole survivor of a massacre at the hands of the terrorist El Ghadan.  The big guy has a job for Bourne; a job suitable to his skills: assassinate the President of the United States (hereafter referred to as POTUS – constantly) at a time and place of the terrorist's choosing. If he refuses or fails, his dearest friend Soraya Moore and her two-year-old daughter Sonya will suffer the consequences. With that charge, Bourne is set loose to devise a plan and do the deed – all in a single week.

Sakey's Brilliance Saga Slumps with A Better World

A Better World - Marcus Sakey

When we last saw Nick Cooper (“Just ‘Cooper,’ please”…) he’d tossed his job. To be more accurate, he tossed his boss – off the roof of a 12-story building. The guy deserved it, though, and so Cooper’s been rewarded with a new job: he’s a special advisor to the President. The country’s a mess, though, and the situation in the Oval Office isn’t a whole lot better.

Out in flyover-land, Cleveland to be exact, Ethan Park and his family had finally become accustomed to suburban life when “The Children of Darwin” cut that city (and two others) off from the rest of the country. First there were empty shelves in the groceries, and then the power went off. And finally, the mistake by the lake was quarantined by armed soldiers.  Cooper knew from analyzing the patterns – his special gift – that this was all part of a plan, a plan that he’d been tricked into setting in motion. Not only did he set it in motion, but by doing so he made the mastermind untouchable. Cooper could sense what was coming, and knew that it ain’t gonna be pretty. Can you say “civil war”? A war between “normal” and “abnormals”? Well, that’s what he saw coming…