Armageddon File

The villain of bestseller Coonts’s Liberty’s Last Stand was a thinly veiled stand-in for Barack Obama. Now, in this second headline-inspired thriller with a conservative slant, he sets his sights on the question of whether the 2016 election was rigged. Billionaire businessman Vaughn Conyer, a populist who’s never held elective office, has defeated Cynthia Hinton, who was “the establishment candidate, promising more of the same,” in an upset victory. Coonts’s series lead, CIA director Jake Grafton, assigns his agent sidekick, Tommy Carmellini, to an FBI task force investigating election fraud. Hinton’s supporters are claiming that foreign governments meddled in the election. Tommy is working with Maggie Miller, the special agent in charge of the task force, when they receive notice that a voting machine technician, Junior Sikes, has been jailed in Pennsylvania on kiddie porn charges and is willing to talk about his part in the voting machine chicanery. Before Junior can squeal, he and three others are whacked. Soon the body count stands at seven, and Tommy is dodging assassination attempts. Less vitriolic than Liberty’s Last Stand, this outing should have broader appeal, though Trump fans will enjoy it most. [em]Agent: Deborah C. Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary Agency. (Nov.) [/em]