Down to the Wire: A Thriller

Praise for Don’t Tell a Soul and David Rosenfelt“This fast-paced and brightly written tale spins along. . . . Don't Tell a Soul is a humdinger.”--- St. Louis Post-Dispatch “[Rosenfelt] has pulled together a cynical political thriller that rings true in this age of terrorism, media hype, and Washington scandals. . . . It’s an enjoyable tale.”--- Minneapolis Star Tribune “Stellar . . . Rosenfelt keeps the plot hopping and popping as he reveals a complex frame-up of major proportions, with profound political ramifications both terrifying and enlightening.”--- Publishers Weekly (starred review)“High-voltage entertainment from an author who plots and writes with verve and wit . . . Plot twists and red herrings abound, and Rosenfelt ratchets up tension with the precision of a skilled auto mechanic wielding a torque wrench.”--- Booklist (starred review)“Rosenfelt’s first stand-alone novel is a riveting thriller that should boost him to best-seller status. . . . Compelling twists and turns, a lightning-fast pace, and breathtaking suspense make this a harrowing ride.”--- Library Journal (starred review)“Absolute fun . . . Anyone who likes the Plum books will love this book.”---Janet Evanovich on Bury the Lead DARE to dream… A reporter for the Bergen News, Chris Turley could never measure up to his father―one of the last great investigative reporters and a difficult man to impress―but still, he can dream. Stuck covering small-time press conferences and town hall meetings, Chris fantasizes about winning his own Pulitzer, however unlikely it seems. FIGHT FOR LIFE… Then one day while he's waiting to meet a source, a giant explosion takes out half of an office building next door. Shocked into action, Chris saves five people from the burning building. His firsthand account in the next day's paper makes him a hero and a celebrity. And that's not all. SURVIVE AT ALL COSTS… The source's next tip delivers a second headline-grabber of a story, and suddenly Chris's career is looking a lot more Pulitzer-worthy. But then it seems this anonymous source has had a plan for Chris all along, and his luck for being in the right place at the right time is not luck at all. In the blink of an eye what seemed like a reporter's dream becomes an inescapable nightmare with his own life on the line. DOWN TO THE WIRE "Rosenfelt has earned his crime-novelist pedigree." ― Entertainment Weekly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. David Rosenfelt is the Edgar and Shamus Award–nominated author of seven novels featuring lawyer Andy Carpenter and of another stand-alone thriller, Don't Tell a Soul. He and his wife live in California with their twenty-seven golden retrievers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. At the height of the Reign of Terror in 1793, an unknown killer is emulating the work of the guillotine by leaving beheaded corpses all over Paris in Alleyn's superior fourth Aristide Ravel mystery (after 2009's The Cavalier of the Apocalypse). Given the tight control of the republican government, the police don't realize that the deaths are part of a series, but eventually former justice minister Georges Danton asks Ravel to solve the case. With delicate peace negotiations with the English under way, Danton fears that word of the atrocities will jeopardize them. The pressure to catch the killer only increases as the roster of victims expands to include a member of the government. Alleyn brilliantly captures the paranoid spirit of the times, and inserts enough twists to keep most readers guessing. This entry approaches the quality of the historical fiction of such authors as Steven Saylor and Laura Joh Rowland. (Dec.) (c) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One Reporter’S Eyewitness Account Of A Nightmareby Chris TurleyI am not a hero. I’m just not the type. I have lived thirty-two years without displaying any physical courage at all. So let’s get that straight going in.But I was across the street from the medical center this afternoon when it exploded. The force of it, even from a distance of a hundred feet, was unlike anything I have ever experienced. And very much unlike anything I want to experience again.Because I was so close, even as I write this I know very few particulars of what happened and why. I reacted in the moment, with no real understanding of what was going on.The left side of the building, as I faced it, crumpled to the ground within seconds. The right side, perhaps even sixty percent of the building as a whole, remained, stubbornly refusing to give in.It was from that area that I thought I heard screams, though because the explosion had dulled my hearing, I couldn’t be sure that the voices were not from people with me on the street.Never having been in war, and war is the only comparison I can make, I was not prepared for the chaos around me. But I had to do something, even though every instinct told me to run away.I went to the building and confirmed that the terrified screams were coming from inside. I ventured in, going through a front door and façade that remained perfectly intact, as if it had not gotten the memo that the rest of the building was . . .IT’S RARE THAT A story comes out just right the first time; usually it’s a process of rewriting and editing. But Chris’s story was approved almost without any changes at all, such was the vivid power of his words. Of course, stories are almost always written to match up with available space, but that was not a consideration this time. For a first-person account of such an enormous event, Chris would have all the space he needed.Eleven people died in that building and another seventeen were injured. Chris wrote about five of them in his story, the five he rescued, but ironically didn’t even know their names. In a way, their anonymity was appropriate for the story; Chris’s rescue efforts were a human reaction to other humans in trouble. Personal knowledge of who they were, or a personal connection to them, was not necessary in any way.When the story was put to bed, Lawrence called Chris into his office, where he poured him a drink. To Lawrence, a drink was scotch, and the only choice offered was for it to either be on the rocks or with water.Chris hated scotch, but saying no to Lawrence was not a consideration, so it presented him with a dilemma. If he took it with water, it diluted the taste, which was a good thing. However, it increased the size of the drink and made it last longer, which was quite a bad thing.On this particular occasion, he opted for the scotch on the rocks, mainly because he needed something to calm his nerves quickly. He had acted instinctively after the explosion, but the enormity of what had happened was finally starting to hit him hard. As he drank from the glass, his hand shook.“You sure you’re okay?” Lawrence asked.“I’m fine. Why?”“You look like you’re enjoying that scotch. Usually you drink it like it was medicine.”Chris laughed. “So why do you always give it to me?”“Because when I die, I don’t want your father coming up to me and saying, ‘Why the hell did you give my son a fucking Kahlua and cream?’ ”“I like Kahlua and cream.”“Quiet,” Lawrence said, looking skyward. “He can hear you.” Then, “But I’ll bet he’s proud of you today.”Talk of his father often made Chris uncomfortable, especially when it was Lawrence doing the talking. Lawrence had an uncompromisingly positive view of Edward, a view which much of the rest of the world did not fully share. Edward had taken a scorched earth approach to journalism, and his unwillingness to take his foot off the throat of his “victims” often provoked fear and hatred, albeit with a healthy dose of grudging admiration.“I was in the right place at the right time.”“That’s what good reporters do,” Lawrence said. “They make sure they’re in the right place at the right time. That’s what your father did with Hansbrough. You did good, but your life will never be the same again.”“Why?” Chris asked.“Because the world is about to know your name. It’s not going to be easy to handle.”“Then can I have another scotch?”Lawrence laughed. “That’s a good start.” He got up to pour the drink when his phone rang, and he answered it. “Terry.”He listened for a moment, frowned, and held the phone out for Chris. “Shit. Here it goes,” he said.“Who is it?” Chris asked.“The Today show.”FOR THE MAN WHO would soon be known as “P.T.,” things were going perfectly.He had arrived at Simmons Crystal and Glass, a large factory in Edison, New Jersey, an hour before closing time. He had pretended to be a vendor, hyping a new type of glass-making machine that produced a more durable product than the kind they were using.It was the fourth time he had been in the building; the first three amounted to crucial scouting missions. Nobody paid him much attention, since vendors wandered in and out of there all the time. But none had ever been there for a reason anywhere close to this important.Of course, all he knew about glass he had learned in the last two months, through the magic of Google. And the wondrous machine he bragged about did not even exist. But it got him in the door, and though his halfhearted efforts were brushed off by the purchasing manager, he couldn’t have cared less.P.T. hid in a storage room until a full hour after closing, then carefully made his way onto the factory floor. He knew from his research that there would be no one around, and that the security guard made his rounds every half hour. That would give him twenty-five minutes to do what he had to do, which was more than enough time.The first thing he did was disable the security cameras, which for P.T. was the easiest part of the operation. He did it in such a way that they would restart when he left and no one would ever know they had been off .P.T. then quickly went to the enormous crystal ball being assembled in its own room near the back of the factory. It was an extraordinarily impressive piece, twelve feet tall and six hundred pounds of fine crystal. He detached four of the panels, then opened his briefcase and took out four clear, odorless packets, each weighing more than three pounds. They were connected by remarkably thin, clear fiber-optic wires to a device no larger than a small computer chip.The difficult part was in attaching the packets to the inside of the detached crystals without damaging the elaborate laser lighting mechanisms inside. He had to be incredibly careful; he was placing them where they could virtually never be detected, yet if he made the slightest mistake it would be immediately noticeable to everyone.P.T. knew that even with all that was to follow, with all the precision maneuvers he would conduct, this would be the most difficult. In fact, it was the only thing that had the slightest risk of failure. If he erred, he would still be able to compensate, but it would be a setback. And he hated setbacks.But things went off without a hitch, and twenty-five minutes later, P.T. was driving home. Alone in the safety of his car, he spoke the first words he had spoken in hours.“Happy New Year.”THE VISITS WERE MORE for him than for her.Logically, there was no getting around that. Harriet Turley had been in the Eddings Nursing Home for Women in Teaneck for three years, which meant that she had literally outlasted more than seventy-five percent of the people who were living there when she arrived. Of course, that would depend on one’s definition of “living.”Chris had always known his mother to be a forceful, independent woman with a razor-sharp mind, one of the few people who could hold her own in a conversation with Chris’s father. The probing, badgering style of questioning that Edward Turley used in his interviews often carried over into his private life, but Harriet could stand toe to toe with him.Most memorable for Chris was the time he sat unnoticed, at the top of the stairs in their house, as Edward and Harriet argued in the kitchen below. The subject was not memorable, something about the way Harriet had dealt with Chris’s fourth-grade teacher about some difficulty he was having. But Edward was criticizing Harriet’s handling of it, and she was giving better than she got, letting him know in no uncertain terms that as long as he was going to be a relatively absentee father, she was going to call the shots.“You’re entitled to your opinion,” she had said in a calm voice. “But I am making the decisions.”Chris often thought that if his interview subjects could have watched her in action, they wouldn’t have been nearly as intimidated by Edward and his typewriter, and in later years his camera and microphone, as they always seemed to be.But Harriet’s mind had gradually been erased, over a three-year process that Chris watched with horror and Harriet initially cloaked in denial. For at least the past two years, she had displayed a decreasing recognition of Chris when he arrived for a visit, and by this time the frequency of her awareness of him as her son had dipped to less than five percent.But even though Harriet had no recollections of his visits five minutes after he left, it was still far more than obligation that brought him there three times a week. He loved her deeply; she was the only person he could count on e... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Bergen News reporter Chris Turley is tipped by phone about a potentially big story of political chicanery. But moments before he is to meet his anonymous informant, there is an explosion across the street, and Chris becomes an instant hero by rescuing five people from a shattered building. The explosion is assumed to be terrorism, and Chris appears on the Today Show 18 hours later. His story about the rescue is reprinted across the country. Soon other, random New Jerseyans die in blasts, and Chris realizes that his informant is also the brilliant and demented bomber. But who is he, and why is he doing these things? Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter novels are known for their breezy storytelling and humor. His first stand-alone, Don’t Tell a Soul (2008), offered fine suspense as well as some humor. This one eschews humor to focus on the actions of ordinary people faced with extraordinary trials. It also employs a whiplash plot turn that may strain credulity, but it’s still an engaging suspense tale. --Thomas Gaughan --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more