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Stand-Alone Thrillers
If you would like to see a brief list of everything, by series, in strict chronological order, please click here.
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Turncoat"For everybody else in America it was the day JFK was killed in Dallas. For me it would always be the day Lily's father turned up on our doorstep."So begins TURNCOAT. Until then, Pete Simon's all-American life had been everything he ever wished for: a good home, a satisfying career, and a marriage still strong and loving after nearly twenty years. But in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everything is about to change. And it begins with the appearance of a disheveled stranger at his door, an unwelcome visitor madly ranting in French about money, death, forgiveness ... and what he did or didn't do during the terrible days of the Nazi Occupation. "One of the many joys of reading Elkins comes from sorting through his myriad plot layers. In his latest . . . Elkins masterfully weaves both back-story about his characters' lives and WWII history into a highly suspenseful plot. Elkins is best known for his fine series starring forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver, but he also excels at WWII-era thrillers. An outstanding novel."- Booklist (Starred Review) |
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The Worst ThingMost lives have a defining moment, an episode that shapes and colors, for good or ill, all that follows.Sometimes it comes early, sometimes relatively late. It can be calamitous or outwardly trivial: a parent's death, an unjust accusation in grade school, a disastrous prom date, a lost love, a failed business. For Bryan Bennett, it was early and calamitous. The son of a consulting engineer, he was kidnapped in Turkey as a five-year-old and held captive for two months under brutal conditions. This mind-searing experience has left him still coping after 45 years with unpredictable panic attacks and bouts of claustrophobia. At the same time, he has retained a lifelong fascination with the subjects of kidnapping and captivity. Now in his forties, he is a research fellow at the Odysseus Institute for Crisis Management, where he specializes in issues related to corporate security and extortion--but only from a removed, theoretical point of view; he lectures, he writes policy papers, he does research, he prepares training materials. What he cannot bring himself to do is to participate in actual hostage negotiations, victim-counseling, or anything else that requires dealing directly with kidnappers, hostage-takers, or their victims. He has, in other words, found for himself a niche that lets him continually test and prove himself by treading gingerly around the edges of his deepest terrors but never confronting them directly, always sidestepping them. Until now he's gotten away with it, but that is about to change. When he is assigned to put on a one-week training program for the executives of Globalseas Fisheries, a multi-national company headquartered in Iceland, the nightmare-foreboding that has dogged him for four decades overtakes him: he himself is kidnapped and—once again—taken hostage. It is the worst thing that can happen to him, the most terrible fate he can envision. At first he is gripped by a white, choking panic in which coherent thought is impossible, but soon enough he comes to grips with the knowledge that the battle of will and nerve in which he is engaged is in reality with himself, and not with his captors. Whether or not he comes out of his ordeal sane and alive is in his own hands, dependent on his own resources. Those resources are called into play, and in the novel's climax a strengthened Bryan, plumbing unsuspected reserves of courage and fortitude, turns the tables on his kidnappers. But for Bryan it's not over till it's over. Later, back home in the United States, when the dust has seemingly settled, a startling new development awaits, throwing an entirely new perspective on what has happened, and on Bryan Bennett himself. |