DANGER ZONE

A first-rate, nailbiting hardcover-debut thriller about a bright, tough, immensely appealing young woman, her intrepid husband, and their scary, no-way-out trap.

Sam Cady watches as wife Maggie bends lovingly over Jimmy, their four-year-old son. He’s thinking of how deeply he adores her, of what a superb mother she is, of the lucky turn of events that brought him to a certain classroom almost five years earlier. He was a New Orleans police detective then, doing a community service stint, Maggie a breathtakingly pretty second-grade teacher. They clicked so decisively. Now—the money’s better—Sam flies helicopters for a living and hopes his wife doesn’t have a real fix on how dangerous the job is. She does. Fact is, Maggie knows a lot more about Sam than he can even begin to guess about her. That, however, is soon to change, when suddenly Jimmy is kidnapped. Sam, hardened ex-cop though he be, is stunned. Amazingly, Maggie isn’t. Distraught, frantic, yes, but still she seems strangely prepared for what’s happening to them. In the next instant, she, too, has vanished, leaving behind a note: “I love you. I have gone to get Jimmy. Don’t follow me, Sam, please.” But of course he will, and a twisty, perilous journey it is. When he finally catches up with her in Manhattan, he finds he’s been married to a stranger, her real identity buried under the elaborate fictions required by the Federal Witness Protection Program. Maggie Jameson Cady is actually Andrea Bellini, daughter of Salvatore—racketeer, killer, Mafia chieftain. And what Sam somehow has to come to terms with is that his young son is a hostage in a war between two ruthless, pitiless, equally vicious ganglords.

Admirably paced and plotted, with the kind of guns-a-poppin’ denouement that begs for transfer to the big screen. (Palmer has published pseudonymously as Nell Brien.)