In Bentley's Tom Clancy Target Acquired, Jack Ryan Jr. is on a seemingly simple stakeout in Israel when he is targeted by trained killers. Ellroy delivers Widespread Panic in his latest, which features a former cop negotiating his way through dark-and-dirty Fifties Los Angeles as a private eye. In The Maze, retired NYPD Homicide Detective John Corey answers the call to help investigate when bodies are found buried on the beach. Broadcast journalist-turned-cybersecurity expert Ali Reynolds must deal with both a serial killer and a former employee of her husband just out of prison in Jance's Unfinished Business (100,000-copy first printing). In Johansen's The Bullet, it's bad news for forensic sculptor Eve Duncan when the former wife of her beloved Joe Quinn returns with dangerous secrets (100,000-copy first printing). In Lippman's tense fantasia, novelist Gerry Andersen is trapped in bed after an accident and fears he is losing his mind when he thinks he's getting phone calls from the main character in his big-deal novel Dream Girl (200,000-copy first printing). From mega-best-selling Patterson and former President Clinton, The President's Daughter features a new family in the White House—and a former White House family targeted by an international assassin (one-million-copy first printing). Joined by Quartermous, Woods hits the Jackpot with another Teddy Fay thriller, as Teddy investigates threats to a film festival in sumptuous Macau.

The exciting eighth Jack Ryan Jr. thriller, the first contribution to the bestselling Tom Clancy franchise from Bentley (the Matt Drake series), finds Jack, an operations officer for the clandestine spy agency known as the Campus, in Israel on a joint mission with the CIA. In a Tel Aviv marketplace, Jack notices an attractive woman with her son, who behaves in a way that suggests he's autistic. When a man with a knife appears bent on attacking the woman, Jack jumps in and fights off the assailant, who flees into the crowd. Immediately afterward, Jack is taken at gunpoint by a pair of Israeli internal security agents to their station, where they harass him for being an American; they suspect he's working for the CIA, but he admits to nothing. His original mission having been a disappointment, Jack, who once helped a childhood friend who was developmentally disabled, decides to stay and track down the woman he saved, Becka Schweigart, an American scientist, and her son, Tommy, to see if he can help the boy. When Becka and Tommy are kidnapped, heroic, chivalrous Jack decides to stick around and assist the Israelis in their attempt to rescue mother and son. The action builds to a terrific, multiple point-of-view battle scene in the air and on the ground in Syria. Bentley proves himself a worthy successor to Tom Clancy. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME. (June)