The Lost Key

July 28, 2014
Coulter and Ellison's suspenseful sequel to 2013's The Final Cut finds Nicholas Drummond, once a New Scotland Yard star, now an FBI agent based in New York City. On his first day on the job for the FBI, Nicholas and his partner, Mike Caine, investigate a fatal stabbing in downtown Manhattan. The victim, Jonathan Pearce, was an antiquarian who owned extremely valuable books that he refused to sell. He was also a military historianâbut that doesn't adequately explain his possession of classified intelligence material. The victim's beguiling daughter, Sophie Pearce, is a translator at the U.N., and Nicholas wonders if her professional ties might have something to do with papa's murder. Meanwhile, Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, Alfie Stanford, drops dead. Can this be a coincidence? The authors' sophisticated third-person narration smoothly propels the action to the exciting climax. Readers may want to see a little more of the charming Mike Caine in the next installment. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.

August 15, 2014
Nicholas Drummond's first day as an FBI agent shakes things up in New York City.The first Brit accepted into the FBI has had a great deal of previous experience as a spy and Scotland Yard detective; he'd also worked before with the lovely and talented Michaela "Mike" Caine on a joint case (The Final Cut, 2013, etc.). Sent to investigate a stabbing on Wall Street, they never suspect they'll soon be involved in the toughest case of their combined careers. The dead man, Johnathan Pearce, owned a specialty bookstore packed with rare and valuable items. But he was also involved with a mysterious group known as the Highest Order that traces its origins back to Jacobean times. Its membership includes some of the world's wealthiest and most influential people. Drummond is a computer hacker of rare skill, but so is Pearce's son, Adam. If they could only find him, Drummond and Caine might discover why his father's last words were "The key is in the lock." Drummond is temporarily suspended when he has to kill several thugs and the assassin sent by Manfred Havelock, a German scientist and industrialist whose father was a member of the Highest Order. The mentally unstable Havelock's company has invented nanotech so advanced that one of his inventions was found in the brain of the assassin. Havelock, who already knows what the key is for, desperately wants to retrieve it. So Drummond, whose own father is also a member of the Highest Order, has to play catch-up. When Havelock's minions kidnap Adam's sister to force him to cooperate, Drummond and Caine follow, only to face every imaginable danger before they can unlock the secret and save the world from untold horrors. A thriller packed with nonstop action, real-life name-dropping and enough cutting-edge science to make you wonder how much of it could be true.

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September 15, 2014
A murder on Wall Street sends new FBI Special Agent Nicholas Drummond on a hair-raising international chase to save the world as we know it. DrummondAmerican by birth, Brit by upbringing, formerly with Scotland Yardand his partner, Special Agent Michaela Mike Caine, start tracing the ties of victim Jonathan Pearce to the ultra-secret Highest Order. The centuries-old Order, a multinational group dedicated to keeping peace, is suddenly being infiltrated and its members murdered by order of mad scientific genius Manfred Havelock, who's after the ultimate miniature nuclear weapon. Both the Order and Havelock are looking for a sunken WWI submarine, said to contain a key to the secret laboratory of Marie Curie, who may have discovered and possibly weaponized the deadly element polonium. So Drummond and Caine race from New York to England, Scotland, and the sewers of Paris to keep the key out of the wrong hands. This second entry (after The Final Cut, 2013) in Coulter's A Brit in the FBI series, a spinoff from her FBI series, is a fast-moving technothriller that proves the collaboration of Coulter and Ellison to be a serendipitous one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2014

In this second in the "Brit in the FBI" series, rookie FBI Agent Nicholas Drummond and partner Mike Caine investigate the Wall Street stabbing death of John Pearce, who appears to have been much more than the naval historian and antiquities dealer he had claimed to be. His adult children are missing, too, and his final words, "The key is in the lock," aren't yielding any obvious clues.

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