THE HUNT FOR THE HIJACKED NERVE AGENT

In this novel, a canister of a lethal nerve agent has been stolen from a government repository in Arizona—can a hero and her associates get to the bottom of this before the bad guys do what bad guys do?

Katherine Denise “KD” Thorne is in a bad way. She has burned bridges with the United States Army and NASA and with her ex-husband, Frank. And she is drinking too much. But she is still tough, as readers see early on when, although tipsy, she dispatches three mixed martial arts creeps in short order. Her old colleague Blunt puts her on to an opening with a shadowy government agency, and they are assigned the nerve gas case. The case involves the company that produced both the agent and an antidote, which it wants to demonstrate in real-life circumstances. The company plans to sell the canister to hokey White supremacist group the Patriot Alliance—though the band is not quite as harmless as it seems. Just when the plot seems straightforward, everything changes. It becomes clear that most of these actors are playing a double, if not a triple, game. People—mostly the bad guys—get betrayed and killed right and left. Finally, there is a showdown in a boondocks in Italy involving KD and her allies. King is an experienced writer, and it shows. He keeps the enjoyable story moving briskly, and he has the patter down pat. The procedures matter more than the characters, but some, like Blunt, who is big and cool, are appealing. He and KD make a very engaging team. There are grace notes here, intriguing diversions, such as a shady player’s paranoia about his wife’s fidelity, and the three MMA palookas who appear again, gluttons for punishment. This is the first installment of King’s KD Thorne series, and it looks promising—readers will hope the author features Blunt in the sequel. And will KD and Frank get back together? King so far has kept readers on tenterhooks about that.

A thriller that offers an undeniably entertaining way to spend an afternoon at the beach.