Barbara D'Amato

This thriller, written in 2009, has themes ripped from today's headlines. Brenda Grant and Daniel Henderson were two minutes away from being in the World Trade Center when the first plane hits on the morning of 9/11. Their company was above where the plane hit and no one managed to get out before the towers collapsed. Brenda lost her fiance who was one of the company owners.

A few years later, Brenda and Grant have started a security company and have a mission to track down terrorists. When they find evidence by trolling chat rooms and the deep web, they try to pass the information along to authorities who can do something about their finds with varying degrees of success.

Sarah, an old college friend of Brenda's gives her a call one day to set up an appointment but, before they can meet, she dies in what looks like a street accident. Having a bit of the friend's point of view, we know that she was pushed into traffic by a man she just met. Brenda, who hasn't seen her since college, wonders why Sarah, who works for a software development company, wanted to meet with her.

Brenda and Daniel are also approached by a man from the government who gives his name as Allen Cooper who works for NSAA and wants to hire their firm for some security work. They are hesitant because they don't like working for the government but the money is too good to pass up. Coop begins to make a play for Brenda by asking her out and taking her to expensive places but Brenda's heart is still with the fiance she lost on 9/11.

Coop asks them to look into a new vote tallying program that will be used in the next presidential election which is only days away. It looks to be a really tight race between the incombent President Kierkstra, a corrupt politician from South Dakota, who took office when the President died of a heart attack and Governor Evan Harkinnon. Meanwhile, Brenda is still puzzled about Sarah's death and sends memo to all of her offices to see if anyone knows more about her. She hears from her office in Egypt that Sarah has some concerns about an election program she was working on but then the office goes silent.

Daniel flies out to see what is going on in Egypt and the story takes a James Bond twist as he becomes the target of unknown assassins and has to wend his way back home facing all sorts of danger and gathering data along the way.

The story was exciting and fast-paced. The villains were larger than life but our smart computer security experts are a match for them. I enjoyed the characters in this one and would recommend it to those who read thrillers.… (plus d'informations)

Deputy Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly has a difficult case. Someone with a great deal of technical knowledge has kidnapped Danni, the three-year-old only child of famous singer Maggie McKittredge and her husband senator Neal Gaston. The child was taken from a Catholic Mass by someone disguised as a priest. The police were notified almost immediately, but within a matter of minutes the child's live picture appears on an Internet web site for all the world to see. She is locked in a room with no food, only a water bottle. As usual, there is the bumbling supervisor (why this seems to be a staple of detective fiction might make an interesting sociological investigation sometime) and the obnoxious and occasionally incompetent feebees (FBI) to cause Polly grief and interference. The kidnapper always seems to anticipate the authorities, leaving little snide notes behind ("You Think You're So Smart"). It soon surfaces that Senator Gaston had quite a few enemies. He was chairman of a senate committee on hate-groups, and his personal manager, Todd Haralson, was a member of a fundamentalist church called the Redeemer Returns. They opposed very little except anything that messed with the human genome, believing that the human germ plasm was part of creation and anything that tinkered with its continuity was evil. Maggie and Neal had visited a fertility clinic in order to conceive, and Danni was the product of a technique that Todd's church believed to be morally reprehensible. Finally, the kidnappers contact them by displaying their demands on the floor of the room where Danni is being held: Free Johnnie Raft. Raft was the incarcerated leader of Bandwidth, a group of cyber terrorists who wanted to take over control of the world by displaying their superior technological intelligence. Believing that people should be chosen for office based on a meritocratic system, they had designed and implemented numerous terrorist activities by controlling computerized communications. In the meantime, Polly has asked her detectives to look for any bizarre crimes or events, in addition to normal police investigations related to the kidnapping, and she discovers that three people had been killed under unusual circumstances. By tracking down what links them together, she pieces together the clues that lead ultimately to discovery of the building where Danni has been held. She also discovers that Bandwidth might not be be led by Raft.… (plus d'informations)

June 2009 COTC Book Club selection.

I actually really liked this and plan to add some more of D'Amato's books to my mental to read list. I was actually surprised to see that this is the first book featuring Emily and her partner - D'Amato wrote it such that I felt there had been previous installments and we were expected to know about the police detectives. I did see that she has a novel featuring Polly Kelly, the Chief of Detectives South, so maybe our main detecting protagonists are spin-off characters. I found the information on autism fascinating and the depiction of the original treatments saddening. The resolution to the mystery was satisfying and the interactions of autistic murder suspect Jeffrey Clifford with Emily were pleasantly unexpected.… (plus d'informations)

Hard Christmas by Barbara D'Amato
Cat Marsella researches the Christmas tree industry in Holland, Michigan and stays with a family.
The whole family welcomes her from all the members. Henry DaGraw has recently died due to an accident that could've been avoided.
She loves the youngest Nell and helps her by bringing friendship and just sitting to listen to her troubles. Nell thinks somebody killed her grandfather and told Cat a little about the accident.
Love hearing about trees and that industry as my family comes from the nursery side of the same trees. Also there are letters from the 1800's and the talk of the ice house is a learning experience as I've read many books recently about this same thing.
Others open up to Cat after the farm worker was found dead. They tell her what they know about the man and the last time they had seen him.
Learning about what each of the saws do is good information for pruning or cutting trees and what each of the colorful tags at the tops mean.
There are troubles, money and land rights that are problems to some.
She works with the police to try to trap the killer and tells the police what her plans are....… (plus d'informations)