The machine that watches everyone was built by the government. It does not work for the government anymore.
A burned-out ex-Homeland Security agent chases a dead man across the country and learns too late that the trail was laid for her by a private apparatus riding the NSA's own wires.
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Been up the last 3 nites til 3 am, can’t put it down!
Just started reading and do not want to put it down. No dinner tonight!
Great series. You will sit up all night reading!
In March, a bomb in Washington ended twelve lives, Sam Jameson's career, and a certain Director of National Intelligence who ordered a five-year-old girl killed to stall Sam’s investigation.
By August she is in Charleston. Sober, unemployed, going to the movies alone.
A man she once interrogated in Venezuela sits down at her table and slides her a movie stub. On the back, in red marker: Alexander Wells is alive.
The evidence is sparse but real: A hospital corridor. A facial-recognition match at eighty-three percent. And a chilling second image, captured in Charleston, just thirty feet behind her.
She runs. Las Vegas, because that is where the trail points. A nightclub owner with Family money and a bad hairpiece. A detective on somebody's payroll. A dead woman in a Henderson safehouse with no marks on her, then a second body in the desert, also unmarked, also impossible to reconcile.
Then a lawyer with an arm missing, and one word left in him before the ambulance doors close.
Capstone.
Somebody has built a private intelligence service on the back of the government's own wires. No charter, no oversight, no record it exists. It reads everything, and it has been reading her a great deal longer than she has been looking for it.
Book Eight in the Sam Jameson series.
Six months after a bombing in downtown Washington ended her career and killed the Director of National Intelligence who had a child murdered to stall her investigation, Sam Jameson is told the man survived.
Everyone agrees that the man who had the girl killed died in the blast. The facial-recognition software begs to differ.
Genre & Subgenres
For readers of Barry Eisler, Joseph Finder, David Baldacci and Mark Greaney.
Conspiracy Thriller
Sam holds no badge and no brief. No service is running her and there is no station to report to. What she is chasing is a private surveillance-and-wetwork apparatus riding the government's own infrastructure.
Vigilante-Justice Thriller
Half this book is a woman with no legal authority working up a criminal chain of command by whatever the room provides, narrating the cost as she goes. Nobody is going to sign off on her methods, including her.
Surveillance Thriller
Post-Snowden and entirely off the shelf. Dark Web purchases, devilish malware, a hacked cardiac implant, NSA backdoors everywhere. Nothing in the toolkit had to be invented.
Everyone agrees that the man who had the girl killed died in the blast. The facial-recognition software begs to differ.
A movie ticket stub, face-down on a kitchen table, with three words on the back in red marker.
Somebody built a second intelligence service on top of the first one. Nobody voted for it.
It has no charter, no oversight, and no record that it exists. It has been reading her mail for months.
The photograph was taken in Charleston. She is in it. So is he, thirty feet back.
She thought she was following the trail. Turns out the trail was laid for her all along, and she figures it out one hotel too late.
A movie ticket stub, face-down on a kitchen table, with three words on the back in red marker.
Somebody built a second intelligence service on top of the first one. Nobody voted for it.
The Tropes Inside
Everybody agrees he was killed in the blast, but the facial recognition software later places him in a hospital corridor at eighty-three percent confidence.
Three words in red marker and two initials she needs a full minute to place. That is the whole inciting incident, and it is enough.
A private intelligence service running on the government's own infrastructure. No warrant, no oversight, no paperwork — because officially there is nothing there to paper.
Nothing in this book's toolkit had to be invented. Everything in it can be bought, rented or downloaded. That is the part worth losing sleep over.
She thinks she is climbing the conspiracy toward the man in charge, but there is a deeper layer. Much deeper.
Two bodies. No wounds, no struggle, nothing a coroner can put on a form. The method is already on the market and already in your chest, or your neighbor's.
She reports a crime to the local police. Within a day the people who committed it know exactly which hotel she is in.
Two homicides, two weapons, two clean sets of prints. Hers. She has never touched any of it.
The two federal agents who arrest her at midnight showed her genuine credentials a week ago in Nevada. That is exactly the problem.
Every lead she finds was left where she would find it. The difference between hunting and being herded is one page she hasn’t read yet.
Real Reviews, Real Readers
“Right up there with James Patterson, David Baldacci, Nelson DeMille, and Frederick Forsyth.”
“It’s 5 a.m. and I just stayed up all night reading!”
“Sharp, extremely well written, and scary as hell!”
“Special Agent Sam Jameson is one very tough, gutsy lady… one of the best suspense/thriller books I have read in a long while. My new favourite suspense author.”
“I love this series… Love this smart mouthed, sassy, sexy agent. I hope her luck holds in future books!”
Reviews sourced from Amazon, Goodreads, and LJEmmerich.com. Names shown as publicly displayed by each platform.
About The Author
Burn - Sam Jameson Book Eight
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Get the ebookBeen up the last 3 nites til 3 am, can’t put it down!
Sam Jameson is one bad ass chick. Very well written books!
Great series. You will sit up all night reading!