Bombshell (An FBI Thriller)
During a winter weekend in the Washington, D.C., area, a student at the Stanislaus School of Music in Maestro, Virginia, is attacked, and a young man’s body is found at the Lincoln Memorial. When aspiring musician Delsey Freestone’s family nickname of the Trouble Magnet holds true (she’s hit on the head when she finds a bloody body in her bathtub), her brother, FBI agent Griffin Hammersmith, en route to join agent Dillon Savich’s special unit in Washington, is soon there to help. Meanwhile Savich and his wife, Sherlock, are investigating the murder of Tommy Cronin, grandson of the former chairman of the former Fed chairman, who raised ire by retiring when the financial crisis erupted. As the situation in Maestro expands to major proportions, Tommy’s closest friends find themselves at risk. While Coulter tackles up-to-the-­minute issues (international drug trafficking, the fiscal meltdown), adds a touch of romance, and resolves crimes satisfactorily, her seventeenth FBI thriller seems short on the verve of earlier entries; coauthoring an upcoming new series, A Brit in the FBI, may be just the change she needs. --Michele Leber