Description:

Amazon.com Review

Take one outspoken, sloppy, slightly boozy FBI agent who's too smart for his own good (and never lets the reader forget it) and exile him to a field office in Arizona so he doesn't embarrass the Agency. Tie him to a short tether and bury him in paperwork. Add a double murder and a missing teenager; throw in a little New Age religion (but don't identify it as Scientology, or L. Ron Hubbard's legions will bury you in lawsuits) and you have Kyle Mills's second Mark Beamon thriller. A bit too smug to be likable, Beamon has the case totally figured out before anyone else has a clue. Shortly thereafter, he's pressured to shut down the investigation. When he persists in following a road that leads right to the front door of the powerful Church of the Evolution, he's suddenly targeted by the IRS, labeled a pedophile, and finally suspended. But with the help of an ex-member of the cult, an eager young agent, and a crusty old retired wire tapper, Beamon manages to track down the missing girl and put a crimp in the church's ambitious plans. These include a conspiracy to take over the nation's telecommunications infrastructure and extend the cult's hold over the movers and shakers of the country--including Beamon's boss and other FBI honchos. A tidy little millennial thriller with echoes of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and those comet-happy cultists in San Diego who followed their leader to a higher plane last summer, this should win Mills (author of __) a legion of new fans. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

This formulaic second novel starring maverick FBI agent Mark Beamon (after Rising Phoenix, 1997) suffers from contrived plotting, ponderous pacing and lapses of credibility. Now exiled to the rural environs of the Arizona bureau office, Beamon is called off the golf course to investigate what initially seems to be the murder of a couple by their disappeared teenaged daughter; although no federal crime is suggested until well into the investigation, G-man Beamon doesn't let details like jurisdiction bother him. And as it happens, young suspect Jennifer Davis has been kidnapped by the Kneissians, a sort of Mooney-like PTL Club, because she is in actuality the granddaughter of the sect's patriarch. The old man is dying, and he plans for her to take his place. However, his surrogate daughter, Sara, has other plans, and she uses the church's millions of members, billions of dollars and tentacular reaches into the highest levels of government and finance to ensure her own rise to power. All of which we know long before Beamon agonizingly figures it out. Suspended and thereby free to "break the rules," Beamon pursues Jennifer's kidnappers through the snowy streets of Flagstaff, with far-fetched strokes of luck and acts of derring-do better suited to old cop shows than to a novel. Shot through with cliches, inane dialogue and unnecessary accounts of Beamon's propensity for strong drink and tobacco, the novel slips along to a highly predictable conclusion. Rights, William Morris Agency.
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