Tailspin-Catherine Coulter

Tailspin
Catherine Coulter
Putnam, Jun 2008, $25.95
ISBN 9780399155031

She woke up to find her hands tied to her chest and her legs locked in wieights just before theyows her into the lake. An expert swimmer, Rachel Abbott, illegitimate daughter of a powerful senator, gets free and goes on the run. She believes her father’s two siblings want her dead to prevent her from revealing something that could have destroyed her dad’s career; though before he died he was planning to go public. In Ketucky Appalachia on her way to a safe house to rest and think, she sees a plane make an emergency crash landing; the pilot and the passenger manage to escape just before the plane exploded.

The pilot is FBI Agent Jackson Crowne who was flying his friend psychiatrist Dr Timothy MacLean to Washington, D.C. in order for the agency to protect him from an unknown adversary. Dr. Maclean suffers from frontal lobe dementia, which has led him to break confidentiality about three patients. Even at the hospital there are attempts on the psychiatrist’s life just as there are on Rachel’s. Happily married Savich and Sherlock are sent to learn what happened to Maclean and then hearing her story, take Racheal under their wing. Soon they too are in danger from killers wanting Timothy and Rachel silenced.

Catherine Coulter is one of the best authors of exciting thrillers writing today. The several subplots running throughout her novels that eventually tie together is a work of art. In the case of TAILSPIN, Savich and Sherlock heat up the pages while a romance between Rachel and Jack blossoms. Readers already care about SS, but will also like JR. and his evolving romance with Rachael. Fans of the series will relish the protagonists and their cronies as they struggle to stay alive against cunning professional killers.

Harriet Klausner