The Revelators

February 1, 2020

In three-time Edgar nominee Abbott's Never Ask Me, the murder of adoption consultant Danielle Roberts in an upscale Austin neighborhood upends the Pollitt family, who feel grief, relief, and suspicion ("Never ask me what I'd do to protect my family," says the wife) (50,000-copy first printing). In three-time Edgar nominee Atkins's The Revelators, Sheriff Quinn Colson, bullet-holed and left for dead, is feeling vengeful but kept from getting back to work by the interim sheriff--who ordered his murder. Continuing No. 1 New York Times best-selling Coulter's popular "FBI Thriller" series, Deadlock has FBI Special Agent Lacey Sherlock and husband Dillon Savich dealing with a psychopath, a secret from beyond the grave, and three red boxes puzzlingly containing the puzzle pieces of an unknown town (200,000-copy first printing). The multi-award-winning Hamilton's A Dangerous Breed brings back Van Shaw, tracking down the (worse-than-he-thought) father who abandoned him before birth while aiming to block a sociopath by stealing a viral weapon that could bring death to thousands (100,000-copy first printing). The acclaimed Kellermans' Half Moon Bay brings back Deputy Coroner Clay Edison, confounded by the discovery of a decades-old child's skeleton in a torn-up park and a local businessman's claim that it could be his sister. In mega-best-selling Camilla Läckberg's The Golden Cage, the increasingly restless wife of a billionaire learns that he is having an affair and exacts luscious revenge. Patterson and Tebbetts join in 1st Case, wherein Angela Hoot gets kicked out of MIT's graduate school, joins the FBI's cyber-forensics unit, and must deal with a messaging app whose beta users are dying without getting killed herself (475,000-copy first printing). In When She Was Good, the Gold Dagger-winning and Edgar short-listed Robotham continues the story of criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac, the girl without a past, first revealed in last year's Good Girl, Bad Girl. And though there are no plot details to share regarding Silva's Untitled new Gabriel Allon thriller, the print run is 500,000, and word has it that MGM has acquired the rights to adapt the entire series for television.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 4, 2020
At the start of bestseller Atkins’s subpar 10th Quinn Colson novel (after 2019’s The Shameless), Colson, the sheriff of Mississippi’s Tibbehah County, is bleeding out after being shot multiple times in the back during an ambush by members of a militia group. Implausibly, he’s soon on the mend, and the brush with death barely slows him down in his subsequent inquiry into the assault, which he believes was the work of strip club operator Fannie Hathcock, who runs drugs and guns, has bashed in an enemy’s head with a hammer, and whose powerful friends include the governor. Brock Tanner, the interim sheriff appointed during Colson’s recovery, hampers Colson’s investigation. Like Hathcock, Tanner isn’t painted with any shades of gray, and he happily collaborates with ICE agents to round up people of color working at the local chicken processing ranch. The quest to take down Hathcock and Tanner feels familiar, and no character has the depth Atkins displayed in his mysteries based on true crime. This entry suggests the series may be running out of steam. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

May 15, 2020
Tibbehah County Sheriff Quinn Colson's 10th appearance finds him hard-pressed to keep his patch of Mississippi in line after his near-fatal shooting in The Shameless (2019) sidelines him in favor of an acting sheriff who's worse than no help at all. How much worse? Well, when Quinn's 12-year-old nephew, Jason, goes AWOL along with his schoolmate Ana Gabriel Hernandez-Ramirez to accept an unsavory invitation to follow the trail of Ana's mother, one of 53 undocumented workers from the local chicken processing plant rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Brock Tanner won't issue an Amber Alert. It's clear that Tanner is uncomfortably cozy with grasping madam Fannie Hathcock, "the queen hellcat of north Mississippi"; with J.K. Vardaman, the good-old-boy governor who's never met a graft he wouldn't latch onto; and with the Watchmen, a militia looking to boost their stockpile of weapons. Tanner's deputies harass Quinn's kid sister, Caddy, and go even further with activist Hector Herrera. The ongoing battle is complicated this time by the release of Donnie Varner from the prison where he's served eight years for dealing guns. Readers waiting to see whether he'll renew his friendship with Quinn, find romance with his old flame Caddy, or end up brokering a massive arms deal for the Watchmen will be treated to another bracing immersion in Tibbehah County's teeming criminal culture, whose opportunistic alliances between bad guys and the lawmen sworn to protect them would be outrageous if they weren't utterly routine. Perfect reading for socially distanced shut-ins who'll be pleased to learn that things could indeed be much, much worse.

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July 1, 2020
The tenth installment in Atkins' celebrated series concludes a multibook narrative arc in which Quinn Colson, sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, battles the forces that has turned his beloved home into a cesspool of corruption. Recovering from the gunshot wounds that nearly killed him in The Shameless (2019)?an attack orchestrated by Mississippi's new governor, who runs the state's criminal syndicate as well as its political machine?Colson sets out to right a nearly capsized ship by bringing down the governor and those around him, especially Fannie Hathcock, the vice queen of Tibbehah County. Working in secret after having been replaced as sheriff by the governor's lackey, Colson gathers his remaining loyalists, including the redoubtable U.S. Marshal Lillie Virgil, and launches his Hail Mary campaign. The cleaning-up-the-county trope is a familiar one (from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest through Stephen Hunter's Hot Springs), and Atkins delivers an action-forward homage, complete with a cordite-smelling finale (blood-spattered, yes, but cleansing, too). This one's a little less nuanced than typical for the series, but it's hard to resist seeing a cabal of evildoing white men brought to their knees.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2020

In three-time Edgar nominee Abbott's Never Ask Me, the murder of adoption consultant Danielle Roberts in an upscale Austin neighborhood upends the Pollitt family, who feel grief, relief, and suspicion ("Never ask me what I'd do to protect my family," says the wife) (50,000-copy first printing). In three-time Edgar nominee Atkins's The Revelators, Sheriff Quinn Colson, bullet-holed and left for dead, is feeling vengeful but kept from getting back to work by the interim sheriff--who ordered his murder. Continuing No. 1 New York Times best-selling Coulter's popular "FBI Thriller" series, Deadlock has FBI Special Agent Lacey Sherlock and husband Dillon Savich dealing with a psychopath, a secret from beyond the grave, and three red boxes puzzlingly containing the puzzle pieces of an unknown town (200,000-copy first printing). The multi-award-winning Hamilton's A Dangerous Breed brings back Van Shaw, tracking down the (worse-than-he-thought) father who abandoned him before birth while aiming to block a sociopath by stealing a viral weapon that could bring death to thousands (100,000-copy first printing). The acclaimed Kellermans' Half Moon Bay brings back Deputy Coroner Clay Edison, confounded by the discovery of a decades-old child's skeleton in a torn-up park and a local businessman's claim that it could be his sister. In mega-best-selling Camilla L�ckberg's The Golden Cage, the increasingly restless wife of a billionaire learns that he is having an affair and exacts luscious revenge. Patterson and Tebbetts join in 1st Case, wherein Angela Hoot gets kicked out of MIT's graduate school, joins the FBI's cyber-forensics unit, and must deal with a messaging app whose beta users are dying without getting killed herself (475,000-copy first printing). In When She Was Good, the Gold Dagger-winning and Edgar short-listed Robotham continues the story of criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac, the girl without a past, first revealed in last year's Good Girl, Bad Girl. And though there are no plot details to share regarding Silva's Untitled new Gabriel Allon thriller, the print run is 500,000, and word has it that MGM has acquired the rights to adapt the entire series for television.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.