Edge

The man who wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove trough a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields this humid morning.


A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.


* * *


When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is a smuch bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.


But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other. I frequently told this to my protege and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept saying it because you can't forget, ever. It's a business with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.
Edge
Jeffrey Deaver

This is a riveting read. Truly. I loved it. Many, many twists and a few switch-backs. It's that curvey. Still, it held my attention and I sped through it in under 24 hours. Sometimes I just have to. And, I had the time yesterday.