Only the Hunted Run

At the outset of Tucker’s provocative third Sully Carter novel (after 2015’s Murder, D.C.), the D.C. journalist hears shots and screams while on a visit to the Capitol. Carter follows the shooter deep into the building, where he stumbles on the body of Barry Edmonds, an Oklahoma representative, who has an ice pick driven through each eye. The killer, who identifies himself as Terry Waters, escapes the scene. Waters later becomes obsessed with Carter, and calls him to commiserate about the fact that both their mothers were murdered years earlier. Once Waters is apprehended in yet another shoot-out, Carter travels to the Oklahoma Indian reservation where Waters claims to hail from, hoping to learn what has driven the man to kill. What Carter finds is unexpected. Meanwhile, Waters is being held at St. Elizabeths, a real-life mental hospital in southeast D.C., with which he’s obsessed. Tucker, a staff writer at the Washington Post Magazine, realistically depicts the newspaper industry in this terrifying thriller. [em]Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary. (Aug.) [/em]