The Widow File

Dani, a data analyst with an elite security firm, possesses the unnerving ability to read people by the trash they leave behind. Receipts, parking tickets, the detritus of daily life—if you leave it behind, she will figure you out. Her latest case involves high-tech industrial espionage at a corporation with ties to the military. But when a team of assassins sweeps through the firm, stealing all files and killing her coworkers, Dani narrowly escapes. Whoever ordered the strike thinks Dani has vital information and they put a hit man named Booker on her trail. Armed with only her wits and a bag of random investigation materials, Dani must figure out who the enemy really is while playing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the cunning hit man who has an agenda of his own.Review“Intuitive analyst Dani Britton, retrieving materials from home after a job is scrubbed, returns to the exclusive private security firm Rasmund in the Washington, D.C., suburbs to find her colleagues dead, her workplace ransacked, and the hit team still in place. Using all of her resources, she teams with debonair audio analyst Sinclair “Choo-Choo” Charbaneaux, who got out of his office undetected, to escape from Rasmund and try to figure out what’s happened. Initially it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the fugitive pair and head assassin Booker, who comes to admire Dani so much that he dreads having to kill her. Then things go south for Booker and his client, who’s desperate to get the Widow File that Dani knows nothing about but presumably possesses, and the chase continues unabated as the body count mounts. Redling (Flowertown, 2012) may owe a nod to James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor for the initial action, but she soon diverges from Grady’s plot, with hair-raising scenes of Dani and Choo-Choo on the Rasmund roof just before a deadly explosion. Well-wrought characters add emotional depth to this adrenaline-fueled espionage thriller, which offers a revealing glimpse of the Washington, D.C., intelligence community.” —Booklist, starred review About the AuthorS.G. Redling parlayed her degree in English from Georgetown University into various careers, including waitress, monument tour guide, sheepskin packer, and radio host. She has leapt from a plane and a moving train, gotten lost in Istanbul and locked in the dining car of a midnight train through the Carpathians. She currently lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and is also the author of the thriller Flowertown.