Deception Point
EDITORIAL REVIEW: From the *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Da Vinci Code* comes an explosive, high-tech thriller that takes readers from the chilling depths of the Arctic Ocean to the treacherous heights of Washington power. When a new NASA satellite spots evidence of an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much-needed victory...a victory that has profound implications for U.S. space policy and the impending presidential election. With the Oval Office in the balance, the President dispatches White House Intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton to the Milne Ice Shelf to verify the authenticity of the find. Accompanied by a team of experts, including the charismatic academic Michael Tolland, Rachel uncovers the unthinkable: evidence of scientific trickery -- a bold deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy. But before Rachel can contact the President, she and Michael are attacked by a deadly team of assassins controlled by a mysterious power broker who will stop at nothing to hide the truth. Fleeing for their lives in an environment as desolate as it is lethal, their only hope for survival is to find out who is behind this masterful ploy. The truth, they will learn, is the most shocking deception of all. In *Deception Point,* bestselling author Dan Brown transports readers from the ultrasecret National Reconnaissance Office to the towering ice shelves of the Arctic Circle, and back again to the hallways of power inside the West Wing. Heralded for masterfully intermingling science, history, and politics in his critically acclaimed, blockbuster thrillers *Angels & Demons* and *The Da Vinci Code,* Brown has crafted a novel in which nothing is as it seems -- and behind every corner is a stunning surprise. *Deception Point* is pulse-pounding fiction at its best.
Gone Tomorrow
Amazon.com Review
Book Description
New York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t.
New York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t.
In the next few tense seconds Reacher will make a choice--and trigger an electrifying chain of events in this gritty, gripping masterwork of suspense by #1 New York Times bestseller Lee Child.
Susan Mark was the fifth passenger. She had a lonely heart, an estranged son, and a big secret. Reacher, working with a woman cop and a host of shadowy feds, wants to know just how big a hole Susan Mark was in, how many lives had already been twisted before hers, and what danger is looming around him now.
Because a race has begun through the streets of Manhattan in a maze crowded with violent, skilled soldiers on all sides of a shadow war. Susan Mark’s plain little life was critical to dozens of others in Washington, California, Afghanistan . . . from a former Delta Force operator now running for the U.S. Senate, to a beautiful young woman with a fantastic story to tell–and to a host of others who have just one thing in common: They’re all lying to Reacher. A little. A lot. Or maybe just enough to get him killed.
In a novel that slams through one hairpin surprise after another, Lee Child unleashes a thriller that spans three decades and gnaws at the heart of America . . . and for Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, it’s a mystery with only one answer–the kind that comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.
Amazon Exclusive Essay: Lee Child on Gone Tomorrow
My career as a writer has been longer than some and shorter than others, but it happens to span the internet era more or less exactly. My first book,
A year or so later I actually got e-mail, and a year or so after that I got a web site, and a couple of years after that I got broadband, and over the following few years I got into the habit of starting the day internet surfing, reading the news and the gossip.
But it is not until now that I can say that one of my books--the thirteenth Reacher thriller, Gone Tomorrow--is truly and exclusively a product of the internet age.
I started the surfing years in a sensible, structured manner, but I eventually learned that the best stuff comes randomly. I started to follow links on a whim, bouncing from place to place, Googling other people’s references, following the maze, looking for rabbit holes.
I found an anonymous police blog from Britain.
It was apparently hosted by a London copper, and because it was secure and anonymous it was uninhibited. The people who posted there said all kinds of things. There were complaints and there was bitching, of course, but also there was a frank and unexpurgated view of police work from behind the lines. I got there in the summer of 2005, just after the suicide bombings on London’s transportation system, and just after a completely innocent Brazilian student had been shot to death by London police, who were under the mistaken impression that the guy had been involved.
Now, as a thriller writer, I’m familiar with the idea that cops can be bent or reckless. But I’m equally aware that’s mostly literary license. I know lots of cops, and they’re great people doing a very tough job. Years ago I met a friend’s eight-year-old daughter--a sweet little girl with no front teeth--and she grew up to be a cop. She won a bravery medal for a difficult solo arrest during which she was stabbed and had her thumb broken. She’s tough, but she’s not bent or reckless. So are the other cops I know.
So I was curious: what happened with the Brazilian kid? How was the mistake made?
So I eavesdropped while the coppers on the anonymous site were asking the same question. And I learned something interesting.
Their first consensus explanation was: because of “the list.” The Brazilian boy was showing “all twelve signs.” I thought, what list? What signs? So I clicked and scrolled and Googled, and it turned out that years earlier Israeli counterintelligence had developed a failsafe checklist of physical and behavioral signifiers, that when all present and correct mean you are looking at a suicide bomber. The list had entered training manuals, and after 9/11 those manuals were studied like crazy all over the world. And the response was mandatory: you see a guy showing the signs, you put him down, right now, before he can blow himself up.
And by sheer unlucky coincidence, the Brazilian kid had been showing the signs. A winter coat in July, a recent shave, and so on. (Read Gone Tomorrow if you want to know all twelve, and why.)
All writing is what if? So I tried to imagine that moment of... disbelief, I guess. You see a guy showing the signs, and probably every fiber of your being is saying, “This can’t be.” But you’re required to act.
So for the opening scene of Gone Tomorrow, I had Reacher sitting on a subway train in New York City, staring at a woman who is showing the signs. Reacher is ex-military law enforcement, and he knows the list forward and backward. Half of his brain is saying, “This can’t be,” and the other half is programmed to act. What does he do? What if he’s wrong? What will happen?
That’s where the story starts. It ends hundreds of pages later, in a place you both do and don’t expect. --_Lee Child_
(Photo © Sigrid Estrada)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. All good thriller writers know how to build suspense and keep the pages turning, but only better ones deliver tight plots as well, and only the best allow the reader to match wits with both the hero and the author. Bestseller Child does all of that in spades in his 13th Jack Reacher adventure (after Nothing to Lose). Early one morning on a nearly empty Manhattan subway car, the former army MP notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. The deadly result of his confronting her puts him on a trail leading back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and forward to the war on terrorism. Reacher finds a bit of help among the authorities demanding answers from him, like the NYPD and the FBI, as well as threats and intimidation. And then there are the real bad guys that the old pro must track down and eliminate. Child sets things up subtly and ingeniously, then lets Reacher use both strength and guile to find his way to the exciting climax. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Nothing to Lose
SUMMARY: Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher—a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose—goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead. It wasn’t the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope, setting up a base of operations against Despair, where a huge, seething walled-off industrial site does something nobody is supposed to see . . . where a small plane takes off every night and returns seven hours later . . . where a garrison of well-trained and well-armed military cops—the kind of soldiers Reacher once commanded—waits and watches . . . where above all two young men have disappeared and two frightened young women wait and hope for their return.Joining forces with a beautiful cop who runs Hope with a cool hand, Reacher goes up against Despair—against the deputies who try to break him and the rich man who tries to scare him—and starts to crack open the secrets, starts to expose the terrifying connection to a distant war that’s killing Americans by the thousand.Now, between a town and the man who owns it, between Reacher and his conscience, something has to give. And Reacher never gives an inch.