Rick Mofina follows up his first rate thriller, Vengeance Road, with an encore performance in The Panic Zone. Both feature newcomer Jack Gannon, a top notch journalist with a tortured past. Despite recognition for his writing skills, he still must battle to win respect in the cutthroat world of the newsroom. When he isn't staring down the barrel of a gun while pursuing leads in a cafe bombing, he's fighting his jealous colleagues to keep his story alive.
And you thought your job was tough?
Rick's hero is a little different from the usual detective/private eye/FBI character we see in crime fiction. Yet we shouldn't be surprised. Journalists around the globe are often the first at a crime scene, ready to report the facts to the reading public. Yet this tenacious talent puts them in the crosshairs between cops who don't want to reveal crucial information and gangsters who don't want anyone to shine the light on their criminal activities.
Rick Mofina does a great job of showing us this hidden world and delivering a page turner that I couldn't put down.
While investigating a bombing in Brazil that killed two of his co-workers, Jack Gannon stumbles across evidence of a child adoption ring that may involves terrorism on a massive scale. His instincts and leads take him to the slums of Rio de Janeiro, to London and then Morocco. Along the way he crosses paths with a woman whose son is presumed dead but has actually been kidnapped in order to serve as the host to a deadly biological weapon.
If Jack can put the clues together, he can reunite the son with his desperate mother and prevent an international catastrophe.
A first rate thriller with a working class hero that could be anyone of us. One man can make a difference in the world. Jack Gannon proves it.
