A KILLER'S CODE

Special Agent Daniela Vega of the FBI goes hunting for a most unusual treasure.

Though Gustavo Toro was a highly professional hit man, he had a conscience, and when he’s betrayed and murdered on orders from his latest employer, he turns out to have left a surprising legacy: an encrypted video meant to be watched by the FBI director in which he reveals that he’s squirreled away details on his long history of murders for hire and hopes that the authorities will find that information and put it to good use. Because he was concerned that this trove might fall into the wrong hands, though, Toro made it exceptionally difficult to find, and when Dani is given the job of uncovering it, every clue she follows seems to lead to a dead end or a dead informant because “someone is cleaning house.” Along the way, Dani’s campaign against the murky Exmyth Technologies leads to a turf war between Special Agent in Charge Steve Wu, head of the FBI’s New York office of counterterrorism, and Scott Hargrave, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York office, with Dani caught in the middle. At length a lead sends Dani to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine in Arizona, where she finds the crucial lead she needs. Even then, however, the author and the crime lords she’s created continue to spark so many violent new complications that Dani constantly has to call on her training as a U.S. Army Ranger. She longs to wrap up the case, which takes quite a while to wind down even after the climax, and get back to the business of helping her mother emerge from the fog that’s kept her in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward for the past 10 years.

If only the FBI didn’t fly its agent everywhere by private jet, she’d be sitting atop a mountain of frequent flyer miles.