THRILLERS
THE CUBAN AFFAIR by Nelson DeMille (Sphere £19.99) WIDELY acknowledged as one of the greatest thriller writers of our times, DeMille’s mastery of the genre is underlined again here.
The charismatic central character this time is Daniel Graham ‘Mac’ MacCormick, a 35-year-old American Afghanistan veteran, now captaining a deep-sea fishing boat out of Key West in Florida.
The boat is mortgaged and Mac is on his uppers — until he is approached by a Miami-based Cuban lawyer with a proposition that could earn him $2 million. The idea is to smuggle back to the U.S. more than $60million worth of assets that were hidden in a cave in Cuba after Castro came to power.
Inevitably, there is a beautiful Cuban woman involved, whose grandfather assembled the treasure trove of currency, jewellery and gold coins that is to be liberated.
Mac takes the challenge, and the drama unfolds at breakneck speed. Filled with wry humour, it roars to a climax, leaving the reader with barely time to breathe. DON’T LET GO by Harlan Coben (Century £20) NAP DUMAS is a French-born small-town cop in New Jersey, where he is also known for handing out summary justice to men who abuse their wives or girlfriends.
Yet he is also a man haunted by his past. Fifteen years ago, his teenage brother, Leo, and his girlfriend were found dead beside the railroad tracks in what the local community thought was a suicide pact — a theory Dumas never believed.
Now, those deaths come back to life when a police officer is killed and Nap’s former girlfriend, who disappeared on the night of the suicides, appears to have returned from the dead as her fingerprints are found at the scene of the officer’s murder.
Add in a mysterious missile control site that may once have had nuclear capabilities, which lay behind Nap and Leo’s school, and you have an addictive roller-coaster of a thrill ride, but one with a distinct moral heart. THE BLIND by A.F. Brady (HQ £12.99) THIS is an intriguing debut from a New York-based psychotherapist writing about a world she knows extremely well.
Her protagonist, Samantha James, is an American psychiatrist whose personal life is a mess — she drinks far too much — but whose professional life caring for the mentally disturbed is beyond reproach.
She has built her reputation on dealing with the most difficult men and women, and she never rejects a challenge.
Enter Richard, a patient with a daunting mental history, who usually refuses even to speak to the therapist assigned to him. Undeterred, Sam takes on the case — only to find that Richard seems to her to be almost completely sane.
He may act obsessively from time to time, but there is no madness she can identify.
What is the secret? Is Richard hiding his true nature so cleverly that even she cannot detect it? This is the question that sustains a gripping story to its fascinating conclusion.