One Got Away

In Lelchuk’s rollicking sequel to 2019’s Save Me from Dangerous Men, Nikki Griffin, a Berkeley, Calif., bookstore owner and badass PI, investigates the alleged blackmail of the matriarch of a prominent San Francisco family that has made a fortune in the pharmaceutical market. The motorcycle-riding Nikki, who looks like “an extra in Sons of Anarchy,” is tasked with tracking down a smooth-talking grifter who milked more than $1 million out of the family’s coffers. But when Nikki finds the seductively manipulative con man and watches as he’s forcibly stuffed into an oversize suitcase by a group of vicious thugs, she quickly realizes that she’s stumbled across a much larger, and far more brutal, criminal enterprise. Nikki, with her brass knuckle vigilante attitude, is nicely complemented by a cast of over-the-top characters, including Buster, a giant mechanic with an anger management problem, and Mason, a kid sidekick with a penchant for note-taking. This breakneck-paced thriller—while straining the bounds of believability at times—is unapologetically bloody fun. [em]Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Apr.) [/em]