Rick Mofina, The Panic Zone

The Panic Zone

Rick Mofina

Mira, Jun 29 2010, $9.99

ISBN: 9780778327943

After his serial killer reporting for the Buffalo Sentinel (see Vengeance Road), Melody Lyons hires Jack Gannon to work for The World Press Alliance. His peers at the Manhattan office feel strongly he is not their equal and needs to shuffle back to Buffalo. However, Melody believes they don't know Jack. She sends him to Rio to determine whether a WPA journalist and photographer, who died in a bombing, were the intended victims and if so why.

In Big Cloud, Wyoming, Emma Lane survives a fiery car crash when she was thrown from the vehicle in which her spouse died and investigators assume their baby did too though she swears she saw her infant rescued; neither assertion re the child can be proven. On a Caribbean cruse, forty years old Roger Tippert dies horribly; the medical examiner is unable to find the cause so forwards the findings to the CDC. As Jack works the Brazilian case, he rules out a drug gang as the police and the fuming local WPA insist and seeks nebulous ties to the Caribbean and Wyoming incidents that places him in trouble with a dangerous person; making him wonder if his colleagues are right about a shuffle to Buffalo.

This action-packed international thriller hooks the reader from the opening gamut until the final confrontation. The story line is fast-paced while the audience wonders what if anything connects the dots so seemingly apart. Jack is terrific as he tries to solve the case and prove his worthiness, but learns a valuable lesson about being alone as he investigates. As with his first thriller (see Vengeance Road), Jack's second journalistic investigation is an exciting novel.

Harriet Klausner