The Widow File (A Dani Britton Thriller)
*Starred Review* Intuitive analyst Dani Britton, retrieving materials from home after a job is scrubbed, returns to the exclusive private security firm Rasmund in the Washington, D.C., suburbs to find her colleagues dead, her workplace ransacked, and the hit team still in place. Using all of her resources, she teams with debonair audio analyst Sinclair “Choo-Choo” Charbaneaux, who got out of his office undetected, to escape from Rasmund and try to figure out what’s happened. Initially it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the fugitive pair and head assassin Booker, who comes to admire Dani so much that he dreads having to kill her. Then things go south for Booker and his client, who’s desperate to get the Widow File that Dani knows nothing about but presumably possesses, and the chase continues unabated as the body count mounts. Redling (Flowertown, 2012) may owe a nod to James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor for the initial action, but she soon diverges from Grady’s plot, with hair-raising scenes of Dani and Choo-Choo on the Rasmund roof just before a deadly explosion. Well-wrought characters add emotional depth to this adrenaline-fueled espionage thriller, which offers a revealing glimpse of the Washington, D.C., intelligence community. --Michele Leber