{"product_id":"demolition-angel-isbn-9781984818744","title":"Demolition Angel","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Crais is at the top of his game, and \u003ci\u003eDemolition Angel\u003c\/i\u003e delivers the goods. With a bang. . . . It’s \u003ci\u003eSilence of the Lambs\u003c\/i\u003e meets \u003ci\u003eSpeed\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . Crais knows how to press all the right buttons in keeping the story line taut and the action, well, explosive.”\u003ci\u003e—San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCarol Starkey is struggling to pick up the pieces of her former life as L.A.’s finest bomb squad technician. Fueled with liberal doses of alcohol and Tagamet, she’s doing time as a Detective-2 with LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section. Three years have passed since the event that still haunts her: a detonation that killed her partner and lover, scarred her body and soul, and ended her career as a bomb tech.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When a seemingly innocuous bomb call explodes into a charred murder scene, Carol catches the case and embarks on an investigation of a series of explosions that reveal chilling intentions. The bombs are designed expressly to kill bomb technicians. Now, as the one tech who survived the deadliest of blasts, Carol is in for the most perilous fight of her life. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eDemolition Angel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Terrific . . . explosive . . . [a] high powered thrill ride.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Gripping . . . Crais piles on plot twists . . . gathering the separate threads at the end and igniting them like a string of  fireworks.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A powerful, self-contained novel of suspense that has the compactness,  velocity, and effectiveness of a well-aimed bullet . . . This is a thriller that  works on every level, a pivotal work from a crime novelist operating at the top of  his game.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Los Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Fascinating and frighteningly believable . . . Starkey  is one of the toughest characters to grace the crowded field of thriller books in  a long time.”\u003cb\u003e—USA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“A flammable techno-thriller with the kind of force that knocks out windows.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Packs an explosive punch. Though the pace of the book moves like a quick-burning fuse, Crais still takes the time in \u003ci\u003eDemolition Angel\u003c\/i\u003e to sketch out some memorable characters: Starkey, haunted and hollow-eyed, covering up her pain with a Bogart-tough demeanor; and John Michael Fowles (aka Mr. Red), a sociopath who gets all sorts of information from the Internet without breaking a sweat. . . . Crais keeps things wound so tight that readers will be getting paper cuts in their rush to finish this one.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Denver Post\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Robert Crais...should be mentioned in the same breath as Robert B. Parker, Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, and James Lee Burke.\"\u003cbr\u003e-\u003ci\u003eHouston Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePraise for \u003cb\u003eL.A. Requiem\u003c\/b\u003e:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[\u003cb\u003eL.A. Requiem\u003c\/b\u003e] manages at once to be a riveting serial-killer tale, a convincing revenge scenario, an engrossing police procedural, an affecting love story, and a tense action thriller.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the best crime novels I've ever read. Absolutely terrific!\"\u003cbr\u003e--David Baldacci\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Crais has crafted a full-bodied novel that explores such topics as honor and friendship and justice and love, that brings its protagonists to a new point of self-awareness...  and provides the kind of puzzle plot that sends mystery fans into paroxysms of joy.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eL.A. Requiem\u003c\/b\u003e is a powerful portrait of Los Angeles in our time: swift, colorful, gripping, a real knockout.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Dean Koontz\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Darker, denser, deeper, and more satisfying than anything he's written before.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eDenver Post\u003c\/i\u003eRobert Crais is the author of nine previous novels, including the bestselling and Edgar-nominated L.A. Requiem. In addition to his previous award-winning books, Crais has written for such acclaimed television shows as L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues. He lives in Los Angeles. Demolition Angel has been purchased by Columbia\/TriStar and producer Laurence Mark (Jerry Maguire, As Good As It Gets), and is being developed as a major motion picture.PROLOGUE To be disrupted: when the human body is blown apart; as by the pressure force of a bomb. —Gradwohl’s Legal Medicine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCode Three Roll Out Bomb Squad Silver Lake, California\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharlie Riggio stared at the cardboard box sitting beside the Dumpster. It was a Jolly Green Giant box, with what appeared to be a crumpled brown paper bag sticking up through the top. The box was stamped green beans. Neither Riggio nor the two uniformed officers with him approached closer than the corner of the strip mall there on Sunset Boulevard; they could see the box fine from where they were.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How long has it been there?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the Adam car officers, a Filipino named Ruiz, checked his watch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We got our dispatch about two hours ago. We been here since.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Find anyone who saw how it got there?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Oh, no, dude. Nobody.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe other officer, a black guy named Mason, nodded.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ruiz is the one saw it. He went over and looked in the bag, the crazy Flip.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“So tell me what you saw.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I told your sergeant.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Tell me. I’m the sonofabitch who’s gonna approach the damned thing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRuiz described seeing the capped ends of two galvanized pipes taped together with silver duct tape. The pipes were loosely wrapped in newspaper, Ruiz said, so he had only seen the ends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio considered that. They were standing in a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, an area that had seen increasing gang activity in recent months. Gangbangers would steal galvanized pipe from construction sites or dig up plastic PVC from some poor bastard’s garden, then stuff them with bottle rocket powder or match heads. Riggio didn’t know if the Green Giant box held an actual bomb or not, but he had to approach it as if it did. That’s the way it was with bomb calls. Better than ninety-five percent turned out to be hairspray cans, some teenager’s book bag, or, like his most recent call-out, two pounds of marijuana wrapped in Pampers. Only one out of a hundred was what the bomb techs called an “improvised munition.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA homemade bomb.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You hear ticking or anything like that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Smell anything burning?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Uh-uh.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Did you open the bag to get a better look?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hell, no.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Did you move the box or anything?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRuiz smiled like Riggio was nuts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dude, I saw those pipes and shit my pants. The only thing I moved was my feet!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMason laughed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio walked back to his vehicle. The Bomb Squad drove dark blue Suburbans, rigged with a light bar, and crammed with all the tools of the bomb technician’s trade, except for the robots. You wanted the robots, you had to call them out special, and he wasn’t going to do that. The goddamned robot would just get bogged down in all the potholes around the box.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio found his supervisor, Buck Daggett, instructing a uniformed sergeant to evacuate the area for a hundred yards in all directions. The fire department had already been called, and paramedics were on the way. Sunset Boulevard had been closed, and traffic rerouted. All for something that might turn out to be some do-it-yourself plumber’s castoff drain trap.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hey, Buck, I’m ready to take a look at that thing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I want you in the suit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s too hot. I’ll use the chest protector for the first pass, then the suit if I have to bring out the de-armer.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll Riggio would be doing on the first pass was lugging out a portable X-ray to see inside the bag. If the contents appeared to be a bomb, he and Daggett would formulate a game plan and either de-arm the device, or explode it in place.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I want you in the suit, Charles. I got a feeling about this one.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You’ve always got a feeling.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’ve also got the sergeant stripes. You’re in the suit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe armored suit weighed almost ninety pounds. Made of Kevlar plates and heavy Nomex batting, it covered every part of Riggio’s body except his hands, which remained bare. A bomb tech needed the dexterity of unencumbered fingers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the suit was in place, Riggio took the Real Time RTR3 X-ray unit and lumbered toward the package. Walking in the suit was like walking with his body wrapped in wet quilts, only hotter. Three minutes in the armor, and sweat was already running into his eyes. To make it worse, a safety cable and hardwire dragged behind him, the hardwire connecting him to Daggett via a telex communicator. A separate wire linked the Real Time to a computer in the Suburban’s cargo bay. He felt like he was pulling a plow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDaggett’s voice came into Riggio’s ear. “How you doing out there?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sweating my ass off, thanks to you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio hated this part the most, approaching an object before he knew what it was. Every time was the same: Riggio thought of that unknown object as a living beast with a life and a mind. Like a sleeping pit bull. If he approached it carefully and made the right moves, everything would be fine. If he startled the dog, the damn thing would rip him apart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEighty-two slow-motion paces brought him to the box.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was unremarkable except for a wet stain on one corner that looked like dog piss. The brown paper bag, crumpled and uneven, was open. Riggio peered into the bag without touching it. Leaning over was hard, and when he did, sweat dripped onto the Lexan faceplate like rain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe saw the two pipes that Ruiz had described. The pipe caps appeared to be about two-and-a-half inches in diameter and taped together, but nothing else about them was visible. They were loosely wrapped with newspaper, leaving only the ends exposed. Daggett said, “How’s it look?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Like a couple of pipes. Stand by. I’ll get us a picture.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio placed the Real Time RTR3 on the ground at the base of the box, aimed for a side view, then turned on the unit. It provided the same type of translucent shadow image that security personnel see on airline baggage units, reproducing the image on two screens: one for Riggio on top of the RTR3 and another on the computer back at the Suburban.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharlie Riggio smiled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sonofabitch. We got one, Buck. We got us a bomb.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m seeing it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe two pipes were impenetrable shadows with what appeared to be a spool of wire or fuse triangled between them. There didn’t appear to be a timer or an initiator of a more sophisticated nature, leading Riggio to believe that the bomb was a garage project made by an enterprising local gangbanger. Low-tech, dirty, and not particularly difficult to de-arm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This one’s going to be a piece of cake, Buck. I make a basic fuse of the light-it-and-run-like-hell variety.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You be careful. Might be some kind of motion switch tucked away in there.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m not gonna touch it, Buck. Jesus. Gimme some credit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Don’t get cocky. Take the snaps and let’s figure out what’s what.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe procedure was to take a series of digital computer snaps of the device via the Real Time at forty-five-degree angles. When they had the device mapped, Riggio would fall back to the Suburban where he and Daggett would decide how best to destroy or de-arm it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio shuffled around the box, aiming the Real Time over the different angles. He felt no fear as he did this because he knew what he was dealing with now and trusted he could beat it. Riggio had approached over forty-eight suspicious packages in his six years with the Bomb Squad; only nine had been actual explosive devices. None of those had ever detonated in a manner that he did not control.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You’re not talking to me, Charlie. You okay?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Just got to work around the potholes, Sarge. Almost done. Hey, you know what I’m having? I’m having a brainstorm.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No, listen to this. You know those people on the infomercials who make all that money with the stupid shit they sell? We could sell these damned suits to fat people, see? You just wear it and you lose weight.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Keep your damned head with that bomb, Riggio. How’s your body temp?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m okay.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn truth, he was so hot that he felt dizzy, but he wanted to make sure he had good clean shots. He circled the box like a man in a space suit, getting front, side, and off angles, then pointed the Real Time straight down for a top view. That’s when he saw a shadow that hadn’t been visible in the side views.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Buck, you see that? I think I got something.” “What?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Here in the overhead view. Take a snap.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA thin, hairlike shadow emerged from the side of one pipe and extended up through the spool. This wire wasn’t attached to the others, which confused Riggio until a sudden, unexpected thought occurred to him: Maybe the spool was there only to hide this other wire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn that moment, fear crackled through him and his bowels clenched. He called out to Buck Daggett, but the words did not form.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRiggio thought, Oh, God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe bomb detonated at a rate of twenty-seven thousand feet per second, twenty-two times faster than a nine-millimeter bullet leaves the muzzle of a pistol. Heat flashed outward in a burst of white light hot enough to melt iron. The air pressure spiked from a normal fifteen pounds per square inch to twenty-two hundred pounds, shattering the iron pipes into jagged shrapnel that punched through the Kevlar suit like hyperfast bullets. The shock wave slammed into his body with an over-pressure of three hundred thousand pounds, crushing his chest, rupturing his liver, spleen, and lungs, and separating his unprotected hands. Charlie Riggio was lifted fourteen feet into the air and thrown a distance of thirty-eight feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven this close to the point of detonation, Riggio might have survived if this had been, as he first suspected, a garage bomb cooked up by a gangbanger with makeshift materials.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt wasn’t.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBits of tarmac and steel fell around him like bloody rain, long after Charlie Riggio was dead.#1 New York Times bestselling author","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300142338277,"sku":"NP9781984818744","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781984818744.jpg?v=1767724985","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/demolition-angel-isbn-9781984818744","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}