WITH A VENGEANCE

Turbocharged thriller from the romantic-suspense author (a.k.a. Kathleen Korbel) of 1997’s Brain Dead (her hardcover debut).

Trauma nurse Maggie O’Brien joins the SWAT team as a medic the same summer that all hell breaks loose in St. Louis. Heat and a cicada infestation have brought every nutcase, wife beater, child abuser, and cop killer out of the woodwork. People are dying like flies. First case is a doozy: former FBI agent Montana Bob has gone crazy, beset by paranoid fantasies about angels of death in dark uniforms. He takes as hostage Maggie’s true love, Sean Delaney, a supertough and sexy cop who’s nonchalantly munching on a candy bar when he’s finally rescued. Later, Montana Bob dies in the ER for no apparent reason. Later still, an hours-long hostage stakeout turns violent when a drunk sets his four-year-old son on fire. Anyone would agree that Jimmy Krebs deserved to die instead of the boy, but his injuries weren’t fatal. Just why is it that he and some of Maggie’s other patients end up in the morgue within a few hours of entering the hospital? Did their names appear on The List, an informal record of perps, suspects, and repeat offenders that the cops and medical personnel scribble on a hospital wall? No use asking Maggie’s dad, a cop with a hair-trigger temper who left the force under mysterious circumstances. Maggie has no reason to trust him: her mother committed suicide, and father Tommy (“The Terminator”) O’Brien has gone through six more wives since. He’s a staunch believer in toeing the thin blue line, and he’s not talking. Maggie’s colleagues—including the flamboyantly gay Dr. Allen Fitzmaurice and fellow trauma nurse Jeannie—don’t seem to know a thing. But the press is on to the story. Can the city’s first female SWAT medic actually be a cold-blooded murderer? Only Maggie can find the real killer as things lead to a shattering, unpredictable climax

Nonstop action and a tough babe with a heart. Top-drawer.