Devil's Gambit — Kris Neri

When Megan Aguila's brilliant but emotionally erratic husband, Nick, is released from prison for a crime he didn't commit, it seemed as if all their troubles were over. But then Nick was kidnapped and held for a staggering ransom. It was fortunate that most of the employees in Northern California's tech-rich Silicon Valley were insured by their employers against extortion, so it fell to his boss, the charming and charismatic billionaire, Dallas Burton Hale, whose legions of enemies hide in the shadows, to cough up the payoff. Was money at the root of the kidnapping scheme, or vengeance? And was it directed at Nick, or Hale?

With so much on the line, Hale went right to the top for help -- to James Scott Stuart, Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office of the FBI. Since Stuart was about to be named the new US Attorney General, it was to his advantage to wrap up a crime that had all the makings of a media circus, so he could sail into his cabinet post in triumph. Why then, did he assign agents to oversee it who were all burned-out has-been's and never-were's? Did Stuart have a secret agenda of his own that overrode even his own success?

When the FBI botches the ransom drop, the kidnapper claims another hostage -- Megan's teenage daughter, Andi, a triathlete whose tough-girl athletics and fresh vulnerability has pierced the married Hale's heart, ratcheting up the tension higher still.

Ultimately, it falls to the most disenfranchised among the law enforcement officials to pierce through the perplexing twists and turns: on-the-ropes local cop, Paul Gray, the man who first sent Nick to prison and who is still in love with Nick's wife, and brand new Special Agent Elena Rios, whose every move seems to put her in deeper trouble with the Bureau higher-ups. But even they are not prepared for the stunning truths they ultimately uncover.

With technology that's as real as tomorrow, which promises to change the map of medicine, potentially saving millions of lives, and building an unimaginable fortune for the one who controls it, and its fast-paced, high-concept plot, the high stakes game in DEVIL'S GAMBIT â€" DEVIL'S DUE also proves that two wrongs really can make a right.