The Treadstone Transgression

September 1, 2021

Back when he was the junior member of a CIA action team (and known as Sierra Six), Court Gentry, a.k.a. the Gray Man, helped messily eliminate a terrorist leader who now appears to be very much alive; next in Greaney's No. 1 New York Times best-selling series. In Hood's Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Transgression, the continuation of a recently launched series, Adam Hayes is asked by his CIA Black Ops program to set up a safe house and is the only survivor when the mission is blown. Dedicated to helping others after having escaped from a shadowy black box program aimed at creating assassins, Evan Smoak, a.k.a. Orphan X, has a new mission in Hurwitz's Dark Horse: rescue the kidnapped daughter of Texas drug overlord Aragon Urrea (200,000-copy first printing). In Jance's Nothing To Lose, retired police detective Beaumont is asked for help by the son of his former partner Sue Danielson, who was murdered years ago by her raging ex-husband. Johansen gives us a big, new Killer View of Jessie Mercado, a Southern California private investigator who surfaces regularly in the "Kendra Michaels" series he writes with his mother, Iris Johansen. In the Edgar Award-winning Kanon's Cold War Berlin-set The Berlin Exchange, two U.S. students and an MI5 operative are being quietly traded far from Checkpoint Charlie for physicist Martin Keller, who had been imprisoned in the UK and now wants to see his ex-wife and son--but what do the East Germans want from him? (125,000-copy first printing). Wending their way through City of the Dead, Kellerman stalwarts Alex Delaware and his buddy, Det. Milo Sturgis, discover a naked, bled-out young man in the streets and a trail of blood leading to the nearby home of sliced-up Cordelia Gannett, an internet influencer Alex knows. Multi-award-winning Northern Irish writer McKinty follows up the New York Times best-selling, Paramount Pictures-ready The Chain with The Chase, so obviously of interest that we won't even worry about the absence of plot details (150,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Mezrich's The Midnight Ride, fresh-from-prison Nick Patterson sneaks into a hotel room on an obligatory job to find his fence dead and scared-witless MIT student Hailey Gordon hiding out after having been caught counting cards; added to this mix is a U.S. history professor's discovery of an unsettling secret about the Revolutionary War (75,000-copy first printing). A domestic-thrills author with 20 Sunday Times best sellers to her name, Parks limns the unaccountable disappearance of two women--contented wife and stepmother Leigh and wealthy, newly married Kai--in cases that shouldn't be linked but seem to be in Both of You (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).

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February 28, 2022
Hood’s solid third contribution to this spin-off series from the late Ludlum’s legendary Jason Bourne franchise (after 2021’s Robert Ludlum’s The Treadstone Exile) opens in Haiti, where gutsy DIA agent Dallys Carver is on a mission to acquire an encrypted flash drive from a disgruntled bank manager proving that the director of the Haitian intelligence service is working with a foreign conglomerate to skirt international sanctions. Things rapidly disintegrate, and Carver and the bank manager have to go to ground. Meanwhile, back on an isolated New Mexico ranch, Adam Hayes, an operative for the secret agency Treadstone, and his wife, Annabelle, are looking forward to their four-year-old son Jack’s upcoming birthday. Then a helicopter arrives with the Treadstone director, who wants Adam to go to Haiti and pick up the flash drive. Adam accepts the assignment, but Annabelle warns him that he can’t miss Jack’s birthday party. Adam’s got 48 hours, and the clock is ticking. This entry depends less on Ludlum’s influence than on Hood’s sure hand with plotting and action. Fans of hard-charging thrillers will get their money’s worth. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM Partners.