Are you ready for a good, pulse-pounding thriller that will keep you turning the pages even after you’ve told yourself you really need to be doing something else (something unnecessary, like cooking dinner or going to bed, or going to work)? That’s great, because The Field Library has some new thrillers that will give you that kind of fun and exciting reading experience.
If you like a little paranormal with your mysteries and thrillers, why not take a look at Full Wolf Moon, by Lincoln Child? Jeremy Logan, the protagonist, bills himself as an “enigmalogist”, a man who’s willing to consider nothing too weird or outlandish to investigate. In this book, he’s at a remote writer’s retreat in the Adirondacks, hoping to finish his book at long last. Now, anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie or read a horror book (or a good serial killer type book) knows this is a mistake: isolated group of more or less strangers, out in the middle of nowhere, you’re practically guaranteed to have something terrible start happening to them. And so it is here: a dead hiker is found on a nearby mountain (named Desolation Mountain, because we want to make sure you know the place is going to be scary), mauled and mutilated beyond what one would expect even for an attack by a wild bear. Logan begins investigating, discovering, as one does, that there are many people who might have been capable of the murder, and finding more and more evidence that the real culprit might be someone, or something, more horrible than anything he’s ever encountered before. A book to read in the middle of the night, on a camping trip, by flashlight.
Or what about a little history with your modern day thriller? The new book, G-Man, by Stephen Hunter, snaps back and forth between the present time and the 1930’s. In the era of gangsters and rumrunners, Lester Gillis, better known as Baby Face Nelson, was one of the most feared and dangerous, and the fledgling FBI (then known as the U. S. Division of Investigation) chose one Charles Swagger, World War I veteran and known as the most skillful gunmen of the time, to catch Nelson. Eighty years later, Swagger’s grandson, Bob Lee Swagger, is selling the family homestead and finds some odd mementoes hidden there, things relating to his grandfather’s time chasing gangsters. Bob Lee knows very little about his grandfather, who died before he was born, and about whom his father seldom if ever spoke. Trying to find out what those items mean and what his grandfather was really doing, Bob Lee comes to realize that someone else is also obsessed with the significance of Charles Swagger’s mementoes. Between Bob Lee’s hunt for his grandfather’s past and the story of Charles’ Swagger’s hunt for Baby Face Nelson, the tension rises inexorably.
I’m not going to say that a particular thriller has been ripped from today’s headlines, but I will say that Dan Brown’s newest book, Price of Duty, seems disturbingly prescient in light of recent cyberevents. The Russian President has been developing a devastating program of cyber warfare against America and the West, and now he has chosen to deploy it, first striking Warsaw, Poland, and wiping out nearly all banking records in the country, walloping the country’s banking system and striking fear throughout the west. That’s just the beginning, a sample of what this malware is able to do: a hijacking of a commercial airliner, an attack on Europe’s power grid, and worse. When the American President is unable to do anything to stop this attack, Brad McLanahan and his group of Scion warriors are thrown into the breach, with all the high tech weaponry the country has been able to develop. Will it be enough to stop the Russians before the West is destroyed? And even if it is, what will the cost of this kind of warfare be?
Who do you root for when everybody seems to be a bad guy? That’s part of the problem in Exit Strategy, by Steve Hamilton. Nick Mason, the protagonist, owes his life to a really dangerous gangster (as you’d know if you read the previous book, The Second Life of Nick Mason). In an effort to break free of the crime lord who controls him, Nick takes on an almost impossible task: to find the three witnesses who are going to testify against the crime lord (Darius Cole), and kill them. Which would be difficult in any event but is even more complicated because, owing to Cole’s infamy and the government’s deep desire to keep this man locked up forever, the witnesses are in deep protection, well-hidden and locked down 24-7. As Mason races against the clock to find and kill these people, things get even more complicated. One of those witnesses, the man whom Mason is replacing as Cole’s go-to assassin, has broken out of the witness protection program and is coming after Mason himself. This isn’t really cat and mouse; it’s more like lion and saber tooth, the tension cranked up to 11.
You don’t really need to eat or sleep, do you? Of course not. Come in and get some thrilling reads to replace that nonessential stuff.
Advertisements Share this:
