With the third entry of the Women’s Murder Club series, James Patterson and co-author Andrew Gross don’t even wait until the opening chapter to get the ball rolling. There, shining out from the dust jacket, is the warning, “One of James Patterson’s best-loved heroines is about to die.” This tantalizing but gratuitous revelation sets the pace for the book, which reads like a package of rapidly exploding firecrackers. But it’s bombs not firecrackers that are blowing people up in San Francisco as the city prepares to host a G-8 meeting of the world’s top finance ministers.

As in the two earlier books in the series 1st To Die and 2nd Chance the principal characters here are San Francisco Police Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer (who serves both as chief investigator and narrator), reporter Cindy Thomas, assistant district attorney Jill Bernhardt and medical examiner Claire Washburn. Each has a life, but they are most alive when they involve themselves in each other’s problems and triumphs.

Soon after Boxer is almost blown away in a townhouse explosion, it becomes clear that she is up against homegrown terrorists who are intent on slowing the juggernaut of global capitalism. At least that’s what they boast in the notes they leave behind with their victims and in the carefully masked e-mails they send to Thomas at her newspaper. Adding to Boxer’s burdens is her discovery that Bernhardt’s husband is abusing her. Then there’s the sticky matter of her growing attraction to Joe Molinari, who’s been sent in from Washington by the Department of Homeland Security to help out with the case.

Boxer’s sleuthing takes her across the bay to “The People’s Republic of Berkeley,” where she begins to unearth a cell led by radical holdovers from the1960s. While their rhetoric is dated, their weapons are state of the art: C-4 explosives ignited by cell phone, intimidation by internet and in an eerie anticipation of recent headlines the lavish use of the deadly poison ricin. In typical Patterson style, the chapters are so brief and filled with action that they flash by like movie scenes.

In an earlier interview with BookPage, Patterson brushed aside discussions of his prolific output this is his 25th book and his massive sales. “I think one of the most interesting things is the diversity of these books,” he said, “and the fact that on a pure readership level, a pure, spellbinding, can’t-put-it-down level, that they’re pretty successful. Forget about sales. They just move along real well.” This is Patterson’s third co-authorship with Gross, who made his debut with 2nd Chance and then went on to collaborate on the historical thriller, The Jester. Patterson’s reputation extends beyond writing a lot of fast-paced books to overseeing the ways they’re promoted and marketed. So the teasing dust jacket tip-off that a major character is “about to die” has his fingerprints all over it. “I involve myself in a fair amount of [planning],” he told BookPage. “We kind of like to sit in a room and go, ‘Do we like the cover?’ ‘Do we like the book?’ ‘Do we like the [proposed] tour?’ I think that’s a healthy thing to do. It works out very well.” It certainly works out well for 3rd Degree. By now the ladies are like old friends, whose quirks we cherish and whose troubles immediately become our own.

John Lawton’s striking new suspense novel, Bluffing Mr. Churchill, is set in the period between the height of the London Blitz and America’s entry into World War II. In this prequel to Lawton’s Inspector Troy series, an Austrian who has insinuated himself into the upper echelons of the Nazi SS and has spied first for Poland and then for the United States is now on the run. The narration rotates among several points of view those of the spy, his Nazi pursuers, his American handler, several British agents and the British policeman who ultimately must make sense of what has occurred. As the main action is playing out, Nazi officer Rudolph Hess lands a plane in Scotland on a mysterious true-life mission that has never been fully explained.

The author also brings other historical figures such as Reinhard Heydrich, a brutal SS chief, to life, and grants memorable cameos to a number of famous men and women who personified the times. One of the most chilling scenes involves Heydrich’s examination of the hands of a corpse that the fleeing spy has tried to pass off as his own. A surgeon has neatly removed the hands from the corpse and Heydrich’s assistant has a great deal of trouble deciding how to carry them into the room. He settles on a silver desert tray, and the fastidious Heydrich examines them very casually as if it were all part of a perfectly normal day. Another of the cameos is made by H.G. Wells, and in a comment that illustrates Lawton’s deftness in handling a broad range of tones, Wells is described as “having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal.” Freddie Troy is kept mostly on the sidelines in this novel, but all of the characters are vividly sketched. The exposition of their backgrounds is pointed and efficient, and their voices are differentiated enough for the reader to keep them straight but not so much that they seem caricatured. Overall, Bluffing Mr. Churchill is a historically fascinating story that is masterfully told. Martin Kich is an English professor at Wright State University.

For more than a generation, British author John Le CarrŽ has written spy novels that both define and transcend the genre. His latest book, Absolute Friends, is his best work in years, another impassioned portrayal of the forces that drive global politics. Ted Mundy is a thistledown of a man, blown wherever fate and his own whims take him. His resume is endless: ex-’60s radical, failed writer, businessman, schoolteacher, spy. It is this last role that comes back to haunt him with the reappearance of his old friend and fellow traveler, Sasha, who offers financial security and a chance to fight the good fight once again. A mysterious benefactor wants to finance a school that will counter what he sees as propaganda supporting the war in Iraq. Mundy eventually realizes, however, that some things can look too good to be true. Absolute Friends is an absolute page-turner, yet in some ways, plot is superfluous to this novel. We are drawn into the plot because we care about the characters, from the simply drawn minor actors to the meticulously assembled protagonist. Absolute Friends is as much an examination of the human soul as it is an intriguing commentary on 21st century conflicts.