A TV and film executive, Staeger displays a real knack for creating cinematic scenes in his engaging first thriller. Cooper, a burnt-out former CIA operative living in a cheap bungalow on the British Virgin Island of Tortola, isn't too happy when "Cap'n Roy," the local police chief, dares to call him at 6 a.m. (Indeed, he gets out of bed and smashes the window in his front door with a baseball bat.) A badly burned, broken and tattooed male body has washed up on the beach, and Roy wants Cooper to dispose of it without disturbing the tourists. Given the corpse's unusual wounds, a shady expat coroner in the U.S. Virgin Islands agrees to conduct an autopsy. The tattoo entices Cooper into digging further, and he soon unearths evidence of a huge buildup of weapons in China. At the same time, Julie Laramie, a low-level agent working for the CIA, stumbles across the same Chinese plot, only to have her superiors threaten to ax her if anything leaks. It's only a matter of time-plus a few more highly visual action moments-before Cooper and Laramie have to secretly link up and trust each other to save the world

After a slow start, Staeger's solid second novel to feature semiretired CIA agent W. Cooper (after 2005's Painkiller) turns into a riveting and timely story revolving around a biological weapons threat. While Cooper explores a botched smuggling job involving stolen Mayan gold artifacts in the Virgin Islands that results in many deaths, Benjamin Achar, a package delivery-company driver, deliberately blows himself up in his garage near Fort Myers, Fla. The explosion releases a deadly virus that kills more than 100 people within two weeks. Enter CIA agent Julie Laramie to investigate the explosion and develop a team to track down other possible sleeper cells. Laramie recruits a reluctant Cooper, her former lover and partner, to assist, even as he continues to look into the killings related to the stolen Mayan artifacts. Superior characterization, in particular the relationship between Laramie and Cooper, which never stops the action, and clear, crisp writing make for a well-above-average thriller