Coulter and Ellison's second Nicholas Drummond thriller (after 2013's The Final Cut) opens with Ansonia Rothchild's desperate letter to her husband, as she tries to uphold the mission of the Highest Order: to deal the Kaiser a death blow, end World War I, and save the world. Fast-forward to the present. Coming from Scotland Yard to the FBI's New York headquarters, Drummond is reunited with agent Mike Caine as they take on a case that leads them to search for Ansonia's lost key and book of secrets. Villain Manfred Havelock is ruthless in his scheme to find the key himself and gain total power. Modern high-tech pits Drummond and Havelock in a race for the answers they both want but for different reasons. Verdict This engaging and suspenseful thriller will entertain readers with impossible nail-biting situations that are resolved by ingenious means. Also appealing is the camaraderie between Drummond and Caine. James Bond fans and readers who like heart-stopping action, cutting-edge science, and technology puzzles are bound to reserve this title. [See Prepub Alert, 3/10/14.]-Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Coulter and Ellison's suspenseful sequel to 2013's The Final Cut finds Nicholas Drummond, once a New Scotland Yard star, now an FBI agent based in New York City. On his first day on the job for the FBI, Nicholas and his partner, Mike Caine, investigate a fatal stabbing in downtown Manhattan. The victim, Jonathan Pearce, was an antiquarian who owned extremely valuable books that he refused to sell. He was also a military historian-but that doesn't adequately explain his possession of classified intelligence material. The victim's beguiling daughter, Sophie Pearce, is a translator at the U.N., and Nicholas wonders if her professional ties might have something to do with papa's murder. Meanwhile, Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, Alfie Stanford, drops dead. Can this be a coincidence? The authors' sophisticated third-person narration smoothly propels the action to the exciting climax. Readers may want to see a little more of the charming Mike Caine in the next installment. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A murder on Wall Street sends new FBI Special Agent Nicholas Drummond on a hair-raising international chase to save the world as we know it. Drummond American by birth, Brit by upbringing, formerly with Scotland Yard and his partner, Special Agent Michaela Mike Caine, start tracing the ties of victim Jonathan Pearce to the ultra-secret Highest Order. The centuries-old Order, a multinational group dedicated to keeping peace, is suddenly being infiltrated and its members murdered by order of mad scientific genius Manfred Havelock, who's after the ultimate miniature nuclear weapon. Both the Order and Havelock are looking for a sunken WWI submarine, said to contain a key to the secret laboratory of Marie Curie, who may have discovered and possibly weaponized the deadly element polonium. So Drummond and Caine race from New York to England, Scotland, and the sewers of Paris to keep the key out of the wrong hands. This second entry (after The Final Cut, 2013) in Coulter's A Brit in the FBI series, a spinoff from her FBI series, is a fast-moving technothriller that proves the collaboration of Coulter and Ellison to be a serendipitous one.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2014 Booklist