Big Time

by Ben H. Winters

Genres: Coming of Age; Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Ben Winters, whom critics attest  "you'll follow...anywhere" (New York Times Book Review), returns with a speculative, corporate espionage thriller that takes the adage "Time is money," and makes it literally, frighteningly so.

HERO: Grace
The best part of Grace’s job at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health is that she can clock out at five. She’s got things to do--like care for her aging, cantankerous mother, her angsty and remarkably bright teenager--with little time for herself to spare. Which is why Grace is peeved when in the late evening, she's called into work. A woman has appeared at a local hospital, injured, shaken, and with an unusual portacath implanted in her chest. The hospital cannot recognize the model. As Grace investigates, the scant info on the device's provenance appears apocryphal. What's been done to this girl? Who's behind it? 
 
VICTIM: Allie
The driver is still refusing to answer. Allie’s in the back seat of a silver SUV: woozy, scared. She’d been at the park with her 14-month-old, Rachel, playing in the sandbox, until she'd been taken--taken by the same woman with a catalog face sitting in the front seat. When she thinks of the baby, she feels a scraping pain inside her. Somehow, Allie escapes from the car. When she arrives at a hospital in Hanover, Maryland, she’s found with an usual device attached to her body. Allie is confused, and as she tries to grasp for any memory or scrap of her past, she comes up empty. She can't remember anything.
 
VILLAIN: Desiree
Desiree is on fire with pain, the pulp of her right eye a bloody mess. She can’t believe the girl had blinded her, can't believe that she’d escaped. Tending to the wound: it had set her back. And now the client is not happy. What she needs is to fulfill the mission. Desiree has a job to do, and she is almost out of time. . .

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320