Supreme Justice
In the near future, the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v. Wade, strengthened the Patriot Act, and dismissed the Fourth Amendment. Devlin Harrison, the second African American president, is a liberal, but the court’s conservatives plan to outlast him. Then conservative justice Henry Venter is shot and killed in a D.C. restaurant. Enter former Secret Service Agent Joe Reeder, who took a bullet while guarding a president. Hailed as a hero, he made the mistake of expressing his opposition to that president’s neocon politics and quickly became a pariah. His only remaining federal-cop friend is FBI Agent Gabe Sloan, and Sloan, valuing Reeder’s insight, adds Reeder as a consultant to the multiagency task force investigating Venter’s murder. Soon a second conservative justice is killed, and the mastermind behind the crimes may be just getting started. Collins (Ask Not, 2013), perhaps best known for his Nathan Heller novels, has crafted a spiky thriller with a fine inside-the-Beltway sensibility. His politics are transparent enough to cost him conservative readers, but the sense is that Collins is probably OK with that. —Thomas Gaughan