SWIFT VENGEANCE – T. Jefferson Parker
G.P. Putnam's Sons
ISBN-13:  978-0-7352-1269-5
August 2018
Mystery

San Diego, California – Present Day

9/11.  Just the sound of that date is enough to bring awful memories and fear into many hearts.  In fact, it is a very fateful place in San Diego, California, where two of the pilots of the planes took flying lessons.  Joan Taucher, FBI agent, has it as her sole mission in life to protect the United States from having anything like that happen again.  Her office has photographs of hundreds of terrorists thumbtacked to the walls, always ready to remind her that there are still more jihadists waiting to kill Americans.

Roland Ford is a private investigator in San Diego, whose only open case at the moment is finding Oxley, the cat, by putting flyers all over town.  Over two years ago his wife died in an airplane accident, and he inherited a family ranch given to them by her family when they married.  There are small casitas that he rents out, including two to his grandmother and grandfather who don't get along very well anymore.

Then he gets a visit from Lindsey Rakes.  He first saw Lindsey in Las Vegas, between piles of hundred and fifty dollar chips at the roulette wheel.  Several hours later she was at the bar, dead broke.  Between Lindsey's drinking and gambling, her husband left her and took their nine-year-old son.  Lindsey had been with the Air Force as a drone sensor, one who directs where drone attacks will center upon seven thousand miles away. The thought of exploding people so far away was too much for her to bear; especially when the time lapse between her finger on the button to kill targets far away and instead hitting and causing death to innocent people haunted her.  Eighteen months later Lindsey is sober and trying to regain some custody of her son, except she got a threatening note.  It says he wants to decapitate her, and signs the note  Caliphornia .

Roland takes the note to Joan Taucher at the FBI, at San Diego's FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.  Then another of the two other drone operators is found in his bed decapitated.  Lindsey is living in a spare casita at Roland's, and he and Joan start to investigate the mystery of who  Caliphornia  is and how to stop him.

You will instantly become enthralled in this tightly woven mystery of Muslims, terrorists, drone attacks, and terrorists in the United States.  Could it be the family of a person in one of Lindsey's last attacks that killed 8 innocent people?  And is Joan just making a mountain out of this note with maybe her job on the line?

 SWIFT VENGEANCE is a spine-tingling, go-for-the-throat thriller that will take you on a wild ride of terror and the post 9/11 trauma to our country.  This is not a romance as we usually review, but if you're a sucker for action and fast paced terror, give SWIFT VENGEANCE a try.

Carolyn Crisher