Greenwich Mean Time

This competent series launch from Bunzel (the Jack Connor series) opens as five passengers in a private aircraft are shot in the head by the pilot, who then bails out. Six years later, Monica Cross, a photographer for Earth Illustrated magazine, is hiking up a mountain in Pakistan when she’s attacked by two jihadists. She escapes death, but falls off a cliff and finds herself amid the remains of a plane crash containing five bodies. This was the plane abandoned by the pilot six years before, an assassination job set up by a clandestine entity known as the Greenwich Global Group. When the pilot, ex-Marine Ronin Pythian, learns that the plane has been found and Cross is in grave danger, he decides to try to rescue her, feeling responsible for her plight. The complicated plot includes such odd characters as a murder-committing U.S. vice president, a Supreme Court justice killed in a sex sting operation, and the dying nonagenarian head of the G3 known as the Chairman. Pythian can read and control minds, which makes him “the deadliest man alive.” That he’s basically invulnerable takes the danger out of the attacks on him. Those with a taste for over-the-top action fare will be satisfied. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Jan.)