THE BODY OF DAVID HAYES

A massive, long-dormant case of embezzlement bobs to the surface, spelling trouble for Seattle Lt. Lou Boldt (The Art of Deception, 2002, etc.) and his banker wife and nonstop suspense for their fans.

Back when Liz Boldt allowed computer wizard David Hayes to seduce her, she didn’t bargain on the sequel: He looted WestCorp, the Seattle bank she worked for, of $17 million that nobody’s been able to trace to this day. Seattle’s finest don’t know where the money went, how Hayes hid it, or even where it came from. But now that Hayes has been paroled after serving five years for fraud, the case is back to haunt the Boldts. First, Lou is called to a fresh crime scene when Danny Foreman, the old friend from the Washington Bureau of Investigation who’d pushed hardest to close the case, is stunned and doped (and Danny’s troubles are far from over). Then Liz is confronted, first with Hayes’s unwelcome request for help, then with sordid evidence that her affair with Hayes could go public at any moment. In short order the Boldts are squeezed by a bunch of brutal, blackmailing bad guys headlined by Sturgeon General Yasmani Svengrad, a mafiya-connected importer; Lou’s colleagues on the force, all of whom seem to be reading from different playbooks; Liz’s bosses at the bank, whose impending merger sets a deadline for Hayes to recover the missing $17 million; and the elusive and unreadable David Hayes. The result is an impossibly tangled skein of double, triple, and quadruple crosses, as Lou and Liz struggle to keep their threatened marriage afloat by figuring out exactly which of their many demanding contacts they can trust to help to do what—and when they’ll need to change plans at a moment’s notice.

Breathlessly exciting stuff, though impossible to follow in any detail either as it’s going down or after it’s over.