Deadly Ruse: A Mac McClellan Mystery

The relationship between former Marine Mac McClellan, who’s working on earning his PI license, and his girlfriend, Kate Bell, is at stake in Helms’s entertaining sequel to 2013’s Deadly Catch. On their way home from the movie theater in St. George, Fla., Kate is shocked to spot her old boyfriend Wes Harrison, who supposedly drowned with two other friends in a boating accident years earlier. While the face looks different, the mismatched blue-and-brown eyes are unmistakable. The skeptical Mac reluctantly agrees to investigate, and soon discovers that Wes’s backstory and that of his friends don’t add up. After Wes shows up in the FBI’s National Crime database as Weston Russell Harrison, on which he’s listed as the leader of a gang of upper middle-class teens in California, Mac dives into the case. Helms expertly steers the elaborate plot even as the stolen identities, suspicious missionaries, and diamond smuggling stretch credulity. Agent: Fred Tribuzzo, Rudy Agency. (Nov.)