Amazon.com (ISBN 0060530391, Mass Market Paperback)

The Kill Clause's opening pages will knot the stomach of even the most seasoned crime reader. U.S. Marshall Tim Rackley is expecting his daughter home for her seventh birthday party. Instead he finds a fellow cop at his door, bearing the news that little Ginny has been savagely dismembered, her remains recovered in a nearby creek. Only an hour or so later, reeling with shock and grief, Rackley learns that the perpetrator has been caught--and that some fellow cops have arranged a little one-on-one meeting for him at an isolated shack, complete with an untraceable gun. Rackley arrives, faces this monster, and...

But that would be giving too much away. Suffice it to say that this powerful opening launches a killer thriller, rich in both adrenaline-pumping action and thought-provoking issues of vigilantism, power, and the moral dilemmas of those sworn to uphold the law. Hurwitz's prose is muscular yet intelligent; he draws characters well, and he unrolls action scenes with amazing vividness (as well as treating us to lots of fascinating lore about lock picking, identity theft, and cell-phone technology). Occasionally his plot twists verge on the outlandish, and a few characters seem to exist only to speechify on a certain point of view. But these are minor flaws in this fine, intense, often un-put-downable tale. --Nicholas H. Allison