Publishers Weekly - March 3, 2014

New Hampshire woods. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (May)

The River of Souls

Robert R. McCammon. Subterranean (www. subterraneanpress.com), $24.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-59606-630-4

Macabre surprises abound in McCammon’s entertaining fifth Matthew Corbett historical (after 2012’s Providence Rider). In the summer of 1703, while on a visit to Charles Town in the Carolina colony, “problem-solver” Matthew and Magnus Muldoon, his “big as a mountain” new friend, join a manhunt for three escaped slaves, one of whom has been accused of murdering a plantation owner’s daughter (though Matthew has uncovered evidence that implicates one of the hunters). Their travel up the River of Solstice—which the locals refer to as “the river of souls”— proves to be a journey into the genuine heart of darkness, replete with ravenous alligators, a tribe of fiercely savage Native Americans, and a seemingly demonic monster known as the Soul Cryer. McCammon resorts to a few credibility-stretching gambits in the closing chapters, but, as usual, he nicely evokes America’s colonial past and deftly straddles the boundary between the explicable and the supernatural. Agent: Cameron McClure, DMLA. (May)

★ The Stranger on the Train

Abbie Taylor. Atria, $15 trade paper (352p)

ISBN 978-1-4767-5497-0

British author Taylor’s taut debut is a heart-stopper. One Sunday evening on a London Underground platform, single mom Emma Turner watches in horror as her one-year-old son, Ritchie, somehow gets on a train that leaves without her. Did someone snatch Ritchie? The police assigned to Emma’s missing person’s case have little sympathy. She has no family, few friends, and no connection with the boy’s father. Dirt poor, she’s overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising a child, the spawn of a quick fling. Worse, in a fit of desperation, she earlier confessed to her GP that she wished Ritchie were dead. So everybody doubts whether the tot was really kidnapped. But when the chips are down, with Ritchie really out of her life, Emma rises to the challenge of saving her son. Beginning with the gasp-inducing

Dante’s Poison: A Mark Angelotti
Novel

Lynne Raimondo. Prometheus/Seventh Street,

$15.95 trade paper (280p) ISBN 978-1-61614-

879-9

Raimondo’s well-crafted second Mark Angelotti novel (after 2012’s Dante’s Wood) finds the Chicago psychiatrist taking part in a new drug trial that he hopes will reverse his recent blindness. To stay busy, Angelotti agrees to help Hallie Sanchez, a friend and potential love interest, look into the murder of a local journalist—and to testify in a lawsuit involving the suicide of a fellow psychiatrist’s patient. Just as Angelotti begins to explore the murky psychological angles in each of these cases, he and Hallie are viciously attacked. Determined to tie disparate threads together, he enlists cro-nies and colleagues to fight the good fight and avenge the injured Hallie. The obstinate, often angry Angelotti puts himself in harm’s way in pursuing suspects who are well aware of his weakness-es and who set a series of deadly traps.

Chicago serves as the distinctive backdrop to this appealing mystery. Agent: Sharlene Martin, Martin Literary Management. (May)

first chapter, readers won’t exhale until the end. Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency. (May)

Every Hidden Fear

Linda Rodriguez. Minotaur, $25.99 (304p)

ISBN 978-1-250-04915-5

A peaceful college town goes berserk in Rodriguez’s solid third Skeet Bannion mystery (after 2012’s Every Broken Trust).

When real estate developer Ash Mowbray returns to his hometown of Brewster, Mo., he proposes to build a new mall that would ruin the old-fashioned downtown, but his real purpose is to humiliate and destroy those who looked down on him as a youth.

Suspects abound after someone fatally clobbers Mowbray with a golf club. Skeet Bannion, the strong-minded but emotionally vulnerable chief of the Choteau University police, must investigate on her own after a sociopathic tycoon pressures the local police to settle the case quickly by framing a high school athlete. Rodriguez efficiently stage-manages a large cast of townsfolk, and neatly uses what Skeet discovers about other people to comment on her personal confusion about her Cherokee heritage and her fear of romance. Agent: Ellen Geiger, Frances Goldin Literary Agency. (May)

★ Sting of the Drone

Richard A. Clarke. St. Martin’s/Dunne, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-04797-7

Insider knowledge of politics paired with amazing state- of-the-art technical details fuels this realistic nonstop ac- tion thriller, the best yet from Clarke (The Scorpion’s Gate). From the Global Coordination Center at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base, the center’s director, CIA officer Sandra Vittonelli, oversees her roomful of drone pilots as they hunt down terrorists across the planet. Once a “Kill Call” to Washington officials establishes that a “High Value Individual” is a threat to the U.S. and eligible to be “droned,” the pilots fire missiles remotely from the unmanned planes and America is instantly that much safer. When a Pakistani tribal clan, al-Qaeda, a revenge-seeking terrorist, and two Ukrainian hackers join forces and declare war on the American drones, a deadly back-and-forth duel ensues, threatening the program and the lives of those who send the planes into the sky.

Clarke, who served in the White House under presidents Reagan and Clinton (the latter appointed him as National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism), as well as both Bushes, has set the standard by which all such titles in this growing subgenre will be measured. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (May)