In this crackling-good thriller from bestseller Eisler (The Night Trade), Seattle PD sex crimes detective Livia Lone, assassin John Rain, and former Marine sniper Dox form a testy alliance to combat a vile conspiracy involving corrupt and toxic government agencies. When Livia survives an assassination attempt while investigating an international child pornography ring, she learns that those behind the hit may work for the FBI. Livia recruits Dox, her partner from The Night Trade, to aid and abet her. Meanwhile, Rain-who originally was offered the hit on Livia-must come out of retirement to assemble a world-class team of black ops all-stars to battle a parallel threat. Persuasive action sequences lead to the merging of the two forces midway through the story. The feisty interplay among these killer elites is as irresistible as if one combined the Justice League with the Avengers, swapping out the superhero uniforms for cutting-edge weaponry and scintillating spycraft. By the satisfying conclusion, the world has been scrubbed a bit cleaner of perfidy. This is delightfully brutal fun. Agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Series heroes join forces with other righteous killers to punish sexual predators in Eisler's latest thriller (Zero Sum, 2017, etc.).A secret internet site called Child's Play features videos of horrible sexual abuse and torture of children. Feds suspect members of the Secret Service may be participants, but their investigation is inexplicably shut down. Meanwhile, John Rain specializes in "services" that appear to have natural causes, but he turns down a hit job on Livia Lone because he doesn't kill women or children. Livia is a sex-crimes investigator for the Seattle PD and has a ferocious hatred for the world's "freaks and predators." Born in Thailand and originally named Labee, she was sold by her parents to the Lone family in Idaho, where she suffered unspeakable abuse. Now she works on both sides of the law, putting creeps in prison when she canbut "the only thing better than a rapist in prison was a rapist in the ground." She has secretly killed at least a dozen of them, and she joins forces with professional killers such as Rain to bring down Child's Play once and for all. The most interesting of the bunch are Dox, who helped Livia kill a child molester in Thailand and would "kill a whole lot of people" to protect her, and Delilah, the blonde Mossad agent who uses her body as well as her gun. One of their threats is Oliver Graham Enterprises (OGE"you couldn't spell rogue without O-G-E"), which wants to fight America's wars and incidentally kill John Rain. The stakes may go even higher than "six active pederasts in the Secret Service" as the story reaches its bloody crescendo. It is rich in backstory, though it can stand alone. Still, Livia Lone (2016) is the ideal introduction to a sympathetic, damaged, and vengeful character.Vicarious pleasure for anyone wanting to see the scum of the world get its due. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

It's hard to imagine a finer opening for a white-knuckle thriller. Seattle sex-crimes detective Livia Lone star of her own Eisler series a few seasons ago is on the trail of a child-torture pornography ring that may have links to high-up government officials. Forty pages in, she's attacked outside a martial-arts academy after teaching a class and begins a thrilling 14-page battle that should be a model for action sequences. Suspecting that mighty forces are being deployed against her, Livia assembles a gang of ex-military types for protection, and the effect is at first confusing as we read of Larison and Dox, Kanezaki and Treven, Horton and Carl. Then one has a sense of eavesdropping on an encounter group with automatic weapons as this crew of ""cutthroats and killers"" go on about their feelings. These folks are interesting for what they do, not what they feel, and some readers may not hang on until the fine action sequence that ends the novel. Too bad, because they never will learn what a ""clean dirty martini"" is. (It involves frozen olive juice.)--Don Crinklaw Copyright 2018 Booklist