11/29/2021
The suspenseful opening of this uneven thriller from bestseller Mezrich (Seven Wonders) finds a mysterious young woman, MIT applied math PhD student Hailey Gordon, in a Boston casino, where she’s card-counting in hopes of winning enough at blackjack to help pay her tuition and rent bills. But once security notices what she’s doing, Hailey flees into the adjoining hotel, where she hides in a room in which she stumbles on a man with a bullet hole in his head. Moments later, ex-con Nick Patterson enters the room. Nick was hoping to meet a fence there about a lead he recently came across to the 30-year-old unsolved theft of multimillion-dollar paintings from the Gardner Art Museum. The pair end up allying with Prof. Adrian Jensen, an expert on Paul Revere, who has obtained a copy of a paper from a colleague purporting to announce a world-changing discovery. Mezrich doesn’t flesh out his characters, and the reveal about the professor’s discovery doesn’t pass the giggle test. With any luck, the intriguing Hailey will return in a sequel with a more convincing plot. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Feb.)
The Midnight Ride is one hell of a trip, a whirlwind tale of murder, mayhem, secret history, and the greatest art heist of all time. I’m a huge fan of Mezrich’s nonfiction books, and I totally devoured his foray into fiction. The guy is just an all-around amazing writer—and Hailey Gordon is a fabulous character. Highly recommended.”—Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling coauthor of Bloodless
"Cinematic, immersive, and completely entertaining! With The Midnight Ride, Boston gets its own Da Vinci Code, and after you race through these irresistible pages, you will never look at the city the same way again. Impeccably researched and captivatingly told. Standing ovation for this terrific thriller!"—Hank Phillippi Ryan , USA Today bestselling author of Her Perfect Life
"A fast ride, with casino hijinks, art heists, a college student looking for trouble, and a dangerous secret from the past. Talk about tense! Mezrich's book is fun with every twist and turn!"—R.L. Stine, author of Goosebumps and Fear Street
“A plot to savor. Witty, smart, detailed, and highly entertaining. The Midnight Ride is exactly what you’d expect from a master storyteller.”—Steve Berry, New York Times Bestselling Author of the Cotton Malone series
"Mezrich brings his high-energy... This one may very well be his best novel." —Booklist
“I love how Ben Mezrich writes: a mix of observational humor, cinematic descriptions, and detailed investigation.”—Katie Couric Media
09/01/2021
Back when he was the junior member of a CIA action team (and known as Sierra Six), Court Gentry, a.k.a. the Gray Man, helped messily eliminate a terrorist leader who now appears to be very much alive; next in Greaney's No. 1 New York Times best-selling series. In Hood's Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Transgression, the continuation of a recently launched series, Adam Hayes is asked by his CIA Black Ops program to set up a safe house and is the only survivor when the mission is blown. Dedicated to helping others after having escaped from a shadowy black box program aimed at creating assassins, Evan Smoak, a.k.a. Orphan X, has a new mission in Hurwitz's Dark Horse: rescue the kidnapped daughter of Texas drug overlord Aragon Urrea (200,000-copy first printing). In Jance's Nothing To Lose, retired police detective Beaumont is asked for help by the son of his former partner Sue Danielson, who was murdered years ago by her raging ex-husband. Johansen gives us a big, new Killer View of Jessie Mercado, a Southern California private investigator who surfaces regularly in the "Kendra Michaels" series he writes with his mother, Iris Johansen. In the Edgar Award-winning Kanon's Cold War Berlin-set The Berlin Exchange, two U.S. students and an MI5 operative are being quietly traded far from Checkpoint Charlie for physicist Martin Keller, who had been imprisoned in the UK and now wants to see his ex-wife and son—but what do the East Germans want from him? (125,000-copy first printing). Wending their way through City of the Dead, Kellerman stalwarts Alex Delaware and his buddy, Det. Milo Sturgis, discover a naked, bled-out young man in the streets and a trail of blood leading to the nearby home of sliced-up Cordelia Gannett, an internet influencer Alex knows. Multi-award-winning Northern Irish writer McKinty follows up the New York Times best-selling, Paramount Pictures-ready The Chain with The Chase, so obviously of interest that we won't even worry about the absence of plot details (150,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Mezrich's The Midnight Ride, fresh-from-prison Nick Patterson sneaks into a hotel room on an obligatory job to find his fence dead and scared-witless MIT student Hailey Gordon hiding out after having been caught counting cards; added to this mix is a U.S. history professor's discovery of an unsettling secret about the Revolutionary War (75,000-copy first printing). A domestic-thrills author with 20 Sunday Times best sellers to her name, Parks limns the unaccountable disappearance of two women—contented wife and stepmother Leigh and wealthy, newly married Kai—in cases that shouldn't be linked but seem to be in Both of You (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).
2021-12-15
Mezrich, best known as a true-crime author, turns to fiction with this history-based thriller.
The novel begins with a prologue that recounts the notorious (and still unsolved) real-life theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, then jumps to the present. Math genius Hailey Gordon is paying her way through graduate school at MIT by gambling at the casinos, and she’s just been spotted counting cards. Fleeing casino security, she dodges through an open hotel room door—and finds a dead man. Right behind her is Nick Patterson, an ex-convict who’s there to meet the now-deceased Jimmy the Lip, who was supposed to be his connection to the deal of a lifetime—one connected to the Gardner heist. Hailey’s and Nick’s mutual desire to elude the cops quickly turns into a partnership to find the real object of the Gardner theft—which wasn’t any of the priceless paintings but an object, as the title suggests, connected to Paul Revere. They’re joined (grudgingly) in the hunt by Adrian Jensen, an enormously snobby history professor who’s been propelled into a related quest by the murder of a despised colleague. In the mode of the history-based, conspiracy-fed thriller à la Dan Brown, their race around Boston’s historic landmarks takes place in just a day. But it feels like much longer. Thrillers like this one are grounded in research, but in this book the research is dropped in giant blocks that leave the action in park for pages at a time. At one critical point, when a character is about to fire a gun, the action is interrupted by almost 300 words on how to load a flintlock pistol—a disquisition that does nothing for the plot but bring it to a screeching halt. When the action does struggle to the surface, it’s increasingly confusing and often improbable.
A conspiracy-driven thriller stalls out on too little action and a dissertation’s worth of research.
