Hostage Situations

Max Bhagat never told Gina Vitagliano he loved her, and now it might be too late. From the moment FBI negotiator Max first met Gina on a plane hijacked by terrorists, she left his orderly, workcentric world shaken and stirred. Their ensuing hot (then cold) romance finally ends when Gina becomes fed up. The last Max hears is that Gina is volunteering for a AIDS group in Kenya, so when he learns that she has been killed in a terrorist bombing in Germany,...

Long and short of it--Barclay delivers on the hype. Fear the Worst starts with one of the better opening lines I've read in a while: "The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs." It's such a simple sentence, speaking of everyday domesticity. You can picture a father. You can picture a daughter. Yet you're already filled with dread. A bad thing has happened. And yeah, for the next four hundred pages, the bad thing...

It's 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg, a professional storyteller and writer, has been taken hostage. He has been abducted from his home in Brooklyn, New York, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don't explain why Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling...

A peaceful Minnesota town, where crime is something that just doesn’t happen, is about to face its worst nightmare. A young boy disappears. There are no witnesses, no clues—only a note, cleverly taunting, casually cruel. Has a cold-blooded kidnapper struck? Or is this the reawakening of a long-quiet serial killer?

A tough-minded investigator on her first, make-or-break case . . . A local cop who fears that big-city evils have come...

Captured by a psychopath posing as an interested house buyer, realtor Annie spends a brutally traumatic year in captivity in a remote mountain cabin and recounts her experiences and dramatic escape to her therapist while agonizing over the ongoing police search for her captor.

Lauren Heller and her husband Roger, a brilliant executive at a major corporation, are attacked in a Georgetown parking lot after an evening out. Knocked unconscious by the assailants, Lauren lies in a coma in the hospital while her husband has vanished without a trace. With nowhere else to turn, Lauren's teenage son Gabe reaches out to his uncle, Nick Heller, a high-powered investigator with a corporate intelligence firm in Washington, D.C. Having...