Book Review: Exposed

Reviewed By: Lynn Harnett

Exposed     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Alex Kava
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Serial Killer   Police Procedural   FBI   Medical   Thriller
Series: Maggie O'Dell # 6
Mira, Oct. 2008

Kava’s sixth Agent Maggie O’Dell (“A Necessary Evil”) thriller opens with her and her boss/mentor Assistant Director Cunningham investigating a bomb threat, which turns out to be a trap, sacrificing innocents to expose the agents to a deadly virus.

Maggie and Cunningham are clapped into The Slammer, a top-secret military disease isolation facility, which is about as sterile and intimidating as you might expect. We know it’s Ebola before army doctor Colonel Benjamin Platt confirms it and we know it’s already too late for Platt’s boss’ ruthless and pragmatic solution to the problem (which will strike most readers as cold-blooded political overkill).

Kava increases the sense of doom and horror by clueing the reader well ahead of the investigators. She switches point of view among Maggie, her partner Tully on the outside (whose troublesome teen daughter made him late for work that fateful day), Platt’s feverish attempts to save everyone, the killer (actually the killer’s assistant killer), and the intended victims, so we know that virus-laced packages have gone out to selected targets around the country well before the investigators know.

How and why the targets are chosen is a puzzle that entertains Artie, the killer’s killer, a crime buff who notes parallels with sensational crimes from the past and implements a few new parallels himself.

Colonel Platt is a tough, upstanding and sympathetic addition to the series who shows signs of being a keeper. The army facility is chillingly well done and the terror scenario is frighteningly easy to accept – particularly given all the allusions to successful past crimes, like the Tylenol tampering and the anthrax cases.

Fans and newcomers alike will enjoy Kava’s usual mix of thrills, FBI profiling and procedure, gory details, personal complications and the headline-inspired plotting.

Lynn Harnett

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

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