A DEADLY INFLUENCE

The creator of FBI profiler Zoe Bentley—last seen in Thicker Than Blood (2020)—launches a new series starring a hostage negotiator whose past makes her just perfect for this case in both good ways and bad.

Eight-year-old Nathan Fletcher is kidnapped on the way home from his school bus stop by someone who demands a ransom of $5 million. It’s clearly an impossible sum for his mother, dental office assistant Eden Fletcher, to raise. Distraught because the caller told her she’s being watched, she reaches out to Lt. Abby Mullen of the New York Police Department, with whom she shares a terrible secret: As children, they were two of the only three survivors of cult leader Moses Wilcox’s suicidal standoff with the police. That bond, which is so frayed that Abby doesn’t even recognize Edie when she responds to her plea for help, will become pivotal because Edie’s ex-husband, David Huff, remained behind as one of the mainstays of a different cult run by Otis Tillman when his wife and their two children fled. Now, one of those children holds the key to the other’s well-being, for the man who snatched Nathan never imagines that Edie will come up with the money; he expects her daughter, Gabrielle, to raise it through the thousands of followers she’s collected as a teenage social influencer. The fact that the kidnapper is holding Nathan in a locked room furnished and decorated to look exactly like his own bedroom suggests an unusually deep-laid plan. Can Abby see around the twists Omer throws at her to rescue the boy before it’s too late?

An expert ticking-clock suspenser best consumed in one prodigious gulp.