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Starred review from March 4, 2019
Bestseller Lee’s riveting third Sam Dryden novel (after 2015’s Signal) reads like an amped-up version of TV’s Stranger Things. In the small town of Brookings, Ore., Danica Ellis is attacked in a store by a man and a woman who are intent on abducting her. She escapes. Dryden, a former Special Forces operative, lives in Malibu, Calif., where he fixes up old houses. A man with a pistol attacks him, but he also escapes. Using his assailant’s cell phone, Sam learns that there’s another intended victim, a woman, who is in danger. Sam links up with the woman, Danica, and together they try to figure out who wants them and why. Flash back to 1989: Sam is 12 years old and recently moved to Ashland, Iowa. Sam meets another 12-year-old, Dani Ellis, and thus begins the fascinating story of the mystery of Ashland, which is in reality a secret military site. In an intriguing twist, Sam and Danica, as adults, have no memory of having known each other in 1989. This is a compulsive, nail-biting, stay-up-all-night thriller. Agent: Janet Reid, New Leaf Literary.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
For readers of Lee's first two Sam Dryden novels (Runner, 2014, and Signal, 2015) who have been itching for backstory about the preternaturally capable former black-ops soldier, the wait is over. In this third installment of the edge-of-your-chair series, Dryden has no choice but to confront his past, which, it turns out, he knows almost as little about as we do. It begins when Sam dispatches an attacker and learns that his would-be killer has a partner with his own target: a woman unknown to Sam named Danica Ellis. Naturally, Sam hotfoots it to Danica's home and saves her from being killed. But what's going on? In the theme that unifies this series, Sam is again on the run, except this time he and Danica have no idea who's chasing them or why. Piecing together leads slowly, they learn that they knew each other, as teenagers in tiny Ashland, Iowa, where their fathers were doing some sort of secret work. Lee jumps between the present and 1989, when a chemical-warfare experiment went badly wrong and required Sam's and Danica's brains to be wiped of the incident. As always, Lee builds tension superbly, but here he adds the extra element of parceling out information from past and present in ever-so-small increments, creating exquisite dramatic irony as we know just enough more than the protagonists do to twist our stomachs into ever-tightening knots. Breakneck pacing, of course, but somehow Lee manages to build character and create an audacious premise without ever taking his foot off the throttle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2018

Former Special Forces operative Sam Dryden (Runner; Signal) foils his own abduction, then that of Danica Ellis, who clarifies their connection by producing a heavily redacted document concerning witnesses to a secret military site in their hometown. Chemically smudged-out memories figure in the plot.

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