Reading Ahead: January 2017, part 1

I realize it feels rather early to start thinking about next year, though I've been ordering January release titles for six months already... In any case, if your New Year's resolutions include reading more, this is a great place to start making your list!

Fatal, by John T. Lescroart. Lescroart's latest is a standalone novel that examines what happens to a seemingly happy married couple after one of them indulges in a one-night stand. Hint: the consequences are a lot bigger and further-reaching than what you'd imagine. Advance reviews describe this as an absorbing page turner that will keep you guessing right up to the last page.

Never Never, by James Patterson & Candice Fox. Harry Blue is the top Sex Crimes investigator in her department. She's a seasoned pro who's seen it all. But even she didn't see this coming: her own brother arrested for the grisly murders of three beautiful young women. Looking into a seemingly simple missing persons case, Harry's been assigned to a new "partner." But is he actually meant to be a watchdog? Still reeling from the accusations against her brother, Harry can't even trust her own instincts, which she's never doubted...until now. Also available in Large Print.

The Prisoner, by Alex Berenson. This new entry in Berenson's popular John Wells series (following 2016's The Wolves) finds Wells on the most dangerous mission of his career. Evidence is mounting that someone high up in the CIA is doing the unthinkable—passing messages to ISIS, alerting them to planned operations. Finding out the mole’s identity without alerting him, however, will be very hard, and to accomplish it, Wells will have to do something he thought he’d left behind forever. He will have to reassume his former identity as an al Qaeda jihadi, get captured, and go undercover to befriend an ISIS prisoner in a secret Bulgarian prison.

The Nowhere Man, by Gregg Hurwitz. In this sequel to 2016's Orphan X, Evan Smoak is the Nowhere Man. Taken from a group home at twelve, Evan was raised and trained as part of the Orphan Program, an off-the-books operation designed to create deniable intelligence assets―i.e. assassins. Evan was Orphan X. He broke with the Program, using everything he learned to disappear and reinvent himself as the Nowhere Man.

But his new life is interrupted when a surprise attack comes from an unlikely angle and Evan is caught unaware. Captured, drugged, and spirited off to a remote location, he finds himself heavily guarded and cut off from everything he knows. His captors think they have him trapped and helpless in a virtual cage but they don’t know who they’re dealing with―or that they’ve trapped themselves inside that cage with one of the deadliest and most resourceful men on earth.