Review by Booklist Review
In this exciting introduction to a new crime thriller series, Deaver and Maldonado take readers on a case of mindboggling proportions. Carmen Sanchez is a successful Homeland Security Investigator and a stickler for rules, but when her younger sister is attacked by someone who ends up being connected to multiple murders across Southern California, she realizes that she might need to cross some lines to take him down. Jake Heron is a professor and private security investigator who, unfortunately, owes Carmen a favor. Together, they battle to stay ahead of the suspect as they untangle a complicated web of corruption. The authors definitely know their subject matter as various governmental departments are explained along with information about spiders and computer hacking. The banter and subtle sexual tension between Carmen and Jake is fun and successful in breaking up the heavy hacker and law talk. This novel is captivating, detail-driven, and intentionally misguiding until the final reveal. Although left on somewhat of a cliffhanger, this novel can be read as a stand-alone book.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This sure-footed collaboration between bestseller Deaver (The Bone Collector) and Maldonado (The Cipher) centers on special agent Carmen Sanchez, who's recently been assigned to Homeland Security investigations in Southern California. Sanchez's rash approach to a hostage situation in the desert town of Ario infuriates her by-the-book colleague, Kevin Albright, who wants her arrested for reckless endangerment. Their boss persuades Albright to keep the handcuffs off Sanchez, but as soon as she's in the clear, she gets thrown into another intense situation: her younger sister, Sara, has been physically assaulted outside a café near her university. Sanchez takes the cell phone dropped by Sara's attacker to her friend, private security expert Jacoby Heron, who unlocks the phone and deciphers its encrypted files. Sifting through the data, Sanchez and Jacoby unravel a complex plot connecting Sara's assailant to a series of homicides and a cyberterrorism ring intent on fostering political discord across California. Slick, cinematic action and fastidiously detailed investigative work bring this series launch to life. Deaver and Maldonado make a good match. Agents: (for Deaver) Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary; (for Maldonado) Liza Fleissig, Liza Royce Agency. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Deaver and Maldonado's first collaboration pits a Homeland Security investigator and her former quarry against a ring of serial killers working their way through California. Special Agent Carmen Sanchez snaps to attention when her kid sister, Selina, is attacked and nearly killed, saved only by the intervention of a luckless good Samaritan. The crime seems random, but Carmen and Prof. Jacoby Heron, a super-hacker expert on intrusion--what he calls "someone or something deliberately entering into a place or situation where they're unwelcome or uninvited"--she once investigated, soon link it to the very recent murder of real estate developer Walter Kemp in San Diego. The killer, identified to the sleuths by a spider tattoo on his wrist and to readers early on by the name Dennison Fallow, clearly has a plan that involves more victims, but what is that plan--and what does it have to do with cyberattacker Tristan Kane and the H8ers, a disgruntled group of men whose online whining about all the opportunities snatched away from them by the privileged few would make them pathetic if its consequences weren't so lethal? Deaver evidently contributes the Chinese-box construction of the plot, in which the solution to each riddle seems to open new mysteries, and Maldonado provides a swiftly evoked sense of the characters' social backgrounds. But it's hard to tell which of them is responsible for the blistering pace, the numerous flashbacks to previous episodes that supply important details about the characters' motivations at the cost of diluting that hard-won suspense, the stilted relationship between Carmen Sanchez and Jake Heron, or the sense of anticlimax that attends the last few revelations. A series seems inevitable. More a compromise than a synthesis, but nonetheless intriguing for all that. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
