High stakes

Logan Tanner is a world-class poker player, that rare breed of gambler whose challenges come from men with shady pasts and uncertain futures. He typically plays for off-shore bank accounts and rare vintage roadsters, but when a mutual friend ropes him into a game with a different kind of prize, Tanner sees a chance to settle a long-overdue score. Since childhood, Lara, a Russian piano prodigy, has been the plaything of her father, Anton, and his sadistic boss, notoriously violent mobster Volkov. The two men taunt her with escalating trials of strength, cunning, and endurance that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with staying alive and pleasing Volkov. Freeing Lara from this increasingly dangerous predicament provides Tanner with an irresistible opportunity to play for the ultimate stakes, life or death for Lara and justice for Tanner's closest friend, one of Volkov's earliest victims. The prolific Johansen launches a new series with new characters, relying on her trademark conflicts involving tests of will between adversaries and lovers alike.

Logan Tanner is a world-class poker player, that rare breed of gambler whose challenges come from men with shady pasts and uncertain futures. He typically plays for off-shore bank accounts and rare vintage roadsters, but when a mutual friend ropes him into a game with a different kind of prize, Tanner sees a chance to settle a long-overdue score. Since childhood, Lara, a Russian piano prodigy, has been the plaything of her father, Anton, and his sadistic boss, notoriously violent mobster Volkov. The two men taunt her with escalating trials of strength, cunning, and endurance that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with staying alive and pleasing Volkov. Freeing Lara from this increasingly dangerous predicament provides Tanner with an irresistible opportunity to play for the ultimate stakes, life or death for Lara and justice for Tanner's closest friend, one of Volkov's earliest victims. The prolific Johansen launches a new series with new characters, relying on her trademark conflicts involving tests of will between adversaries and lovers alike. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Having crafted two Sam and Remi Fargo adventures with the late Cussler (Pirate and The Romanov Ransom), former California law enforcement officer Burcell takes the daring duo on another far-flung adventure in Clive Cussler's The Serpent's Eye. Grabbing the tail end of 2020's Total Power and marching right along to the next adventure, Flynn/Mills's Enemy at the Gates finds Mitch Rapp protecting trillionaire Nicholas Ward, the object of a CIA mole's surreptitious search, while simultaneously using him as bait to dig up the mole (500,000-copy first printing). In The Burning, Kellerman père et fils bring back Deputy Coroner Clay Edison, dealing with the murder of a wealthy man in the midst of wildfire and blackout while anxious that his ex-con brother may be connected. In Lupica's Robert B. Parker's Stone's Throw, Paradise police chief Jesse Stone finds uncomfortable links between Paradise's acting mayor, whose death surely looked to be suicide, and the dangerous perpetrators of a suspect land deal. No plot details yet, but Johansen is clearly playing for High Stakes when she sets her latest in the gambling world. In Edgar/Anthony-nominated McCreight's Friends Like These, friends with secrets gather in the Catskills ten years after graduation, and things get bloody.