Enigma

Starred review from July 31, 2017
Bestseller Coulter is at the top of her game in her 21st FBI thriller featuring married agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock (after 2016’s Insidious). The first of two major plots gets off to a fast start when an apparently crazed young man barges into the house of pregnant Kara Moody in Washington’s upscale Georgetown neighborhood. Savich arrives in time to save Kara by shooting the home invader, who winds up in a coma; in the hospital, he’s labeled a John Doe pending identification. Soon afterward, Kara gives birth to a son. When the baby is abducted from the same hospital, Sherlock and her fellow agents get on the case. In an equally pulse-pounding second story line, Savich sends FBI agents Cam Wittier and Jack Cabot in search of convicted bank robber Manta Ray, who has escaped custody while being transported to federal prison. Twists and turns galore in both investigations ensure there’s never a dull moment. Newcomers will find this a good entry point, since it works just as well as a standalone as part of the series. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.

August 1, 2017
Not one but two exciting new cases for Coulter's FBI (Insidious, 2016, etc.).Much to the displeasure of Detective Aldo Mayer of the D.C. Metro Police, Special Agent Dillon Savitch sneaks into the home of Kara Moody, a pregnant woman who's being held hostage by a seemingly crazy young man who's raving about unspecified dangers to both of them. After Savitch is forced to shoot the unidentified man, both he and Kara end up in the hospital--Kara in labor. Savitch is worried about the John Doe, who's still unconscious, and asks the police to provide protection, which Mayer pulls without timely notification. Only the presence of Kara, who's visiting his hospital room, saves the man from an assassin. When Kara's newborn son, Alex, is kidnapped from the hospital, Savitch thinks finding his father may provide answers. Unfortunately, Kara remembers nothing of the party she attended at a friend's house where she suspects she was roofied, raped, and impregnated. Savitch's wife, Sherlock, works with the team that's been set up to find missing babies while Savitch hunts for answers to the unidentified man's background and an unusual drug found in his system. Meanwhile, Irish charmer Liam Hennessey, who prefers the moniker Manta Ray, is daringly broken loose while he's on his way to prison for robbery and murder. Savitch asks ex-Army Ranger Special Agent Jack Cabot to join one of his new agents, Cam Wittier, in leading the manhunt because he knows that the escapee and his rescuers are headed into the Daniel Boone National Forest. The pair join a forest ranger and Police Chief Harbinger in a dangerous hunt. Hennessey, who had hidden the proceeds from his robbery of a bank's safe-deposit vaults, has apparently been freed by someone desperate to get back one of the missing items. In order to solve both cases, Savitch and his teams must go way beyond ordinary police work to come up with some surprising and horrifying motives. A formulaic twofer combines some interesting philosophical questions with more familiar charges of Beltway corruption that could be ripped from the latest headlines.

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September 1, 2017
Fiction touches on current events in two separate cases for FBI Special Agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock and their Criminal Apprehension Unit. Savich, called by an old friend, subdues an erratically behaving armed man who has broken into the home of pregnant Kara Moody, raving wildly and calling himself an enigma. Then Kara's newly delivered son is stolen from the same hospital in which her unknown attacker lies comatose. Meanwhile, Irish international criminal Liam Hennessey (known as Manta Ray), who was caught after robbing safe-deposit boxes, escapes during a prison transfer and touches off a chase through Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest. While one case leads to a morally offensive quest for a drug to extend life, the other is found to involve a wealthy Russian's attempt to ease U.S. sanctions by compromising someone close to the president. Despite some shoot-outs, the action and suspense quotients in this entry in Coulter's FBI series remains moderate at best. But the always-reliable Coulter, a master of smooth, eminently readable narratives, won't lose any readers here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)