Hunted

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee, 382 pages

With just a week to go before a hotly contested presidential election, the whole country is on edge. A suicide bomber at a mall in Los Angeles, specifically a Middle Eastern young woman, makes everything even more precarious, with the ranting right wing candidate spouting more "close the border" and "ban Muslims" talks at his final rallies before election day. FBI agent Shreya Mistry is convinced that more attacks are coming, and is determined to do anything she can to track down the cell responsible for the bombing, even if it means ignoring everything her superiors tell her to do.

There's something very reminiscent of 24 about this book, with a tight timeline, escalating terrorist plots, and conspiracies galore. I appreciated that the points of view managed to encompass people on all sides, including the radicalized young women and men of the cell, the FBI agents, and the parents of the radicalized young adults who are just trying to find their children before it's too late. Were there some things that were completely unbelievable? Absolutely. Was it tough to read right after our own tight presidential election? Definitely. Was it better than I expected anyway? You bet.

Tourist Season

Tourist Season by Carl Hiasaen  378 pp.

This is an early novel by Hiaasen and he hadn't developed the voice of his later works. Even so, it is another send up of the "Florida Culture" he writes of so well. A series of seemingly random deaths have been occurring in the Miami area. A visiting Shriner, a woman from a senior living community, the Chamber of Commerce president, are all victims of a crew of oddball terrorists intent on driving the visitors and invading transplants that are ruining the state of Florida. The protagonist, Brian Keyes is a private detective and former newsman. The perpetrators are a motley crew calling themselves The Nights of December (Las Noches de Diciembre) which includes a newspaper reporter, a former pro football star, and a failed "Cuban" bomb maker, and the Seminole mastermind of the Native American casinos in the state. There are more deaths in this book than in Hiaasen's later novels but each occurs in a different and somewhat interesting way. The later books, especially the ones that feature the character Skink, are better efforts.

Unleashed

Unleashed by David Rosenfelt (2013) 308 pages

In Rosenfelt's eleventh installment of the Andy Carpenter mystery series, Andy (a criminal defense attorney) finds himself reluctantly taking on Denise Price as a client. She's been accused of poisoning her wealthy husband with botulism shortly before he flew his airplane, causing him to crash after becoming paralyzed by the toxin mid-flight. Meanwhile, a foreign terrorist plot is quietly taking shape as ex-military artillery experts are recruited to bring down prominent targets simultaneously in several cities across the U.S. As Andy's team investigates, looking for evidence that Denise is innocent of murder, some business associates of her husband are found dead. When the team follows the money to see where it leads, they begin to see hints that something big is being planned.

Andy's chapters are written in an engaging first-person narrative, while we're kept informed of the terrorist plot development by a third-person narrator. Unleashed is a fast read, with humor, suspense and some surprising twists.