Reading Ahead: December 2016, part 1

Unlike years past, pickings seem rather slim this December. Granted, October and November have great new titles, so there should be plenty to keep us busy until the New Year. (Hint: January is chock-full of great new titles, so please don't despair!) In the meantime, here are a couple to whet your appetite.

The Midnight Bell, by Jack Higgins. The ripples from three seemingly unrelated incidents meet and overlap, creating havoc in their wake. Desperate men will act, secrets will be revealed – and the midnight bell will toll. As the Irish proverb states, "The bell tolls at midnight, as death requires it." Higgins, always a favorite, whisks readers between Northern Ireland, London and Washington, DC in his latest outing. Fans won't want to miss it.

The Seventh Plague, by James Rollins. Rollins's Sigma Force novels have been steadily gaining popularity among readers over the last decade; this is the 15th in the series and there is also a Sigma Force movie in development as of this writing.  Here, Rollins asks the question: if the biblical plagues of Egypt actually happened, could they happen again, on a global scale?  

Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, the leader of a British archeological expedition, Professor Harold McCabe, comes stumbling out of the sands, frantic and delirious, but he dies before he can tell his story. The mystery deepens when an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone had begun to mummify the professor's body...while he was still alive. But his autopsy team falls ill to an unknown disease, which then rapidly begins to spread throughout Cairo. Sigma Force director Painter Crowe is contacted by a colleague in Egypt--Professor McCabe, it seems, had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses. As the pandemic grows, a disturbing question arises.
Are those plagues starting again?

If you're new to the series, my advice, as always, would be to start at the beginning with 2004's Sandstorm.