FBI Special Agent Ana Grey debuts in this electrifying thriller marked by psychological acuity and unfaltering suspense. After Ana Grey pulls off “the most amazing arrest of the year,” the squad supervisor — who doesn't like irreverent, tough-minded young women — gives her a reprimand instead of the promotion she deserves. As a test, she is assigned a high-profile case involving a beloved Hollywood movie star and an illegal supply of prescription drugs. It doesn't take Ana and her partner, Mike Donnato, long to realize "this is not a case” but “a political situation waiting to explode”—and they're holding the bomb. As the boundary between her private and professional lives begins to blur, Ana's own world collides with her investigation, and she is forced to confront the searing truth about the nature of power and identity, and the mystery of her past

An electrifying new thriller that brings back the complex, strong-willed, often-maverick FBI agent — Ana Grey — whom we first met in the author’s stunning debut novel, North of Montana. This time Special Agent Grey is working on a kidnapping case — a fifteen-year-old named Juliana has been abducted in Santa Monica. Grey’s counterpart in the Santa Monica Police Department is Detective Andrew Berringer. They’ve worked together before — and they’ve been more than just working together ever since. It’s Ana’s job “to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood.” But when Juliana turns up — traumatized into a state of total and paralyzing terror — it becomes clear that Ana has gone too far: she is viewing her own life from the perspective of Juliana’s blasted emotional terrain. And in a moment of passion (Andrew has betrayed her) and panic (is it possible that he also means to harm her?) Ana points a gun at him and shoots. Now she is both criminal investigator and criminal as she breaks her bail agreement to continue tracking the abductor, torn between her powerful emotional connection with Juliana and the fraying connection she has to her own common sense and to the truths she knows about Andrew — and about herself. Psychologically acute and unstoppably suspenseful — Good Morning, Killer is a searing, addictive read

Starred Review. At the start of Smith's superb third thriller to feature Ana Grey (after 2003's Good Morning, Killer), the FBI special agent, who's still recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder after shooting a crazed detective on a suicide mission seven months earlier, learns that the skeletal remains of her missing onetime fiancé, fellow special agent Steve Crawford, have turned up in Oregon's Cascade Mountains. Ana later finds out Steve was murdered by members of an anarchist group with a penchant for homemade bombs. After training at the FBI's undercover school, Ana uses an alias to penetrate the group, which includes a former FBI agent gone bad, Dan Stone. As Allfather Stone plots a terrorist act he calls the Big One, Ana must burrow through layers of paranoia to discover the precise threat the FBI is dealing with. Ana's nuanced and coolly observational narrative voice perfectly complements the well-paced action, which builds to a satisfying conclusion that leaves open the next chapter of Ana's story