DARK ANGEL

Letty Davenport seeks to infiltrate a group of freelance hackers in order to thwart their next project—or maybe to help it along.

Ordinary People, an anti-MAGA cabal of lefties, has already pulled off a string of small-scale disruptions, and the word from the CIA is that they plan to take down the power in the Twin Cities, where Letty grew up. Sen. Christopher Colles, the unofficial boss who’s been impressed by Letty’s unflappable skills with weaponry, wants her to pose as the girlfriend of National Security Agency computer specialist Rod Baxter as he seeks to hook up with Ordinary People across the country in California. After their first attempt goes spectacularly wrong, their forces are beefed up by CIA operative Barbara Cartwright and Department of Homeland Security investigator John Kaiser, who worked with Letty in The Investigator (2022), and they succeed in getting close to Craig Sovern, a prominent Ordinary Person who’s already been wreaking havoc on a number of railroad trains and plans to go bigger and bolder. And these aren’t just any trains. Realizing that Ordinary People’s attacks on the hate-fueled social media platform SlapBack may be a sign that their larger operations are providing an important service to the cause of world peace, Letty and her peeps switch from trying to bring down the organization to trying to protect it from the likes of Russian agent Arseny Stepashin and his trusted contractor Tom Boyadjian—all while keeping everything hush-hush. Yeah, right. Sandford alternates brisk action sequences with a steady stream of revelations that make equivocal players and their ambiguous relations even more complicated.

A female-forward thriller that makes a strong case that smart, unflinching women should run the world.