cover image Killing Pace

Killing Pace

Douglas Schofield. Minotaur, $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-250-12055-7

Schofield (Storm Rising) enlivens a standard plot about a framed law-enforcement agent with some uncommon elements. In early 2015, amnesiac Lisa Green, who was in a car crash two months earlier, recovers her memory in Florida’s Everglades City. She realizes that she has been held prisoner for weeks, by a man purporting to be her boyfriend, and that she is in fact Laura Pace, an undercover Customs and Border Protection officer. Flash back to the previous year. Under an alias, Laura travels to Sicily, where she uncovers an illegal international adoption scheme operating between the island and Miami. Those responsible for the crime frame her for the murder of a couple in Miami and attempt to dispose of her by engineering the car crash. With her memory restored, Laura is determined to clear her name, bring the guilty parties to justice, and find a missing baby. Laura recruits an unusual group of allies, who range from members of a shadowy U.N. intelligence unit to a mobster from Schofield’s previous novel. It’s to Schofield’s credit that a potential romance remains only that. Readers will eagerly await his next mystery. [em]Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Nov.) [/em]