In bestseller Child's strong sixth thriller featuring Jeremy Logan (after 2017's Full Wolf Moon), the enigmalogist, who solves "problems nobody has encountered before," gets the challenge of his life. Claire Asperton, general counsel to the Chrysalis Management Group, is concerned about the bizarre death of a board member of the pioneering tech company. Russell Spearman, a producer at Chrysalis Film Studios, collapsed on a glass table, fatally impaling himself on its shards. Asperton then received an anonymous message reading: "Spearman Was the First. No Accident. The Second Will Drop the Day After Tomorrow." The threat comes at an especially fraught time for Chrysalis, which is about to roll out a breakthrough in virtual reality, a launch imperiled after a second board member dies. With no demand attached to the warning, Logan must use every bit of his formidable intellect to figure out what's going on and avoid more casualties. As Child masterfully ratchets up the tension, he makes even secondary figures feel real enough for readers to worry about their survival prospects. Michael Crichton fans will find a lot to like. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (July)

Slipping away from regular coauthor Douglas Preston for another solo outing four years after Full Wolf Moon, Child brings back enigmalogist Jeremy Logan to probe the inexplicable, in this case something going haywire with the extraordinary new virtual reality technology being rolled out by the leading tech company Chrysalis. Jeremy quickly realizes that the new technology is a threat to the world.

This sixth in Child's Jeremy Logan series pits the vaunted enigmatologist against high-tech evil. A scientist falls, with the help of an ax in his back, down a deep crevasse on an Alaskan glacier. Later, a business mogul suffers an apoplectic, bloody death in a Manhattan business meeting. Then a Beechcraft pilot fatally crashes for no obvious reason. All three are members of the board of directors for the mega-company named Chrysalis, and the connection among their sudden demises is a mystery. So the company urgently requests the assistance of Jeremy Logan, a paranormal sleuth who has at least five major successes under his belt. He drives his Lotus to a facility hidden deep in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It's a highly secure, secret building shaped like a torus, or doughnut. There, he meets with both techs and execs and receives complete authority to investigate--to ask any question of anyone inside the complex. Chrysalis is about to launch the newest version of its Venture product, and they are afraid that someone has programmed it to kill its users. Meanwhile, Logan is highly enamored of their current technology and already uses a virtual assistant called Pythia until his equipment is upgraded to the silken-voiced and ever so helpful Grace. "Grace, you're a peach," he tells her. "No, Jeremy," she replies, "I am a virtual assistant." It happens that the torus contains "a nest of fire ants," and as Logan pokes and prods, people continue to die. What hath Chrysalis wrought? A killing machine? Whatever malware might drive the new device, humans amply supplement with intra-doughnut gunfights. Grace, Logan, and the dead mogul stand out among the characters, while the others make a lesser impression. Logan's fans won't be disappointed--and it's an enjoyable stand-alone thriller, so it's not necessary to read the series in order. Plenty of imagination, with a peek at plausible near-future technology. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Child is probably best known as the author, with Douglas Preston, of the Special Agent Pendergast thrillers (Bloodless, 2021), but has also written several solo novels, a handful of which have featured Jeremy Logan, an investigator of phenomena that seem to defy explanation. In the latest Logan novel, the sixth in the series, a massive corporation known as Chrysalis is under attack. Members of its board are dying in bizarre circumstances. Could it be murder? Do the deaths have anything to do with Chrysalis' new virtual-reality technology that millions of people will soon be using? There is a formula to the Logan novels, and it's a good one: something seemingly inexplicable happens, and Logan, using a combination of brute-force logic and wild imagination, solves the puzzle in the nick of time. That's well and good, but It's what happens along the way that makes the books so enjoyable: the false leads, blind alleys, and bad assumptions; the slow accumulation of facts that points to a solution that cannot possibly be true--except that it must be. An intriguing, suspenseful, and very satisfying thriller.