Leave No Trace Leaves no Doubt: This is a Great Thriller!

Such conspiracy tales are nothing new. We’ve seen them before in genre benchmarks like Fletcher Knebel’s “Seven Days in May” and James Grady’s “Six Days of the Condor.” The difference here is that the approach of debut author A. J. Landau (a pseudonym for celebrated thriller author Jon Land and book reviewer Jeff Ayers, who’s covered even more books than Land has written) is as visceral as it is visual. Watching the Statue of Liberty fall, nearly followed by Independence Hall, is a punch to the gut of every American.

And that’s exactly the villains’ point. A fanatical former general in tandem with a trucking magnate with a serious axe to grind are targeting America’s greatest symbols in an attempt not only to bring the country to its knees, but also rebuild it from the ground up. Targeting monuments that fall under the auspices of the National Park Service, pits them against Michael Walker, a crack agent for the Investigative Service Branch, or ISB, which is the Park Service’s version of the FBI. Speaking of the FBI, the assistant head of the Bureau’s New York office, Gina Delgado, teams with Walker to sort through the conspiratorial morass before the villains’ plot to murder ten million Americans comes to fruition.

Walker and Delgado are anything but run-of-the-mill heroes. He lost a foot in the same violent confrontation on Mount Rainier (another national park) that claimed the life of his wife. And Delgado is also a demolitions expert whose expertise serving with a special ops team in Iraq lays the groundwork for her ability to defuse a bomb as easily as she can set one.

LEAVE NO TRACE winds its way from coast to-coast, offering nonstop action and thrills en route to a expertly staged climax in South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Park. That’s where the trail Michael follows ultimately takes him, while Gina’s spirits her to a mothballed military base in Ohio where an insurgency force is prepping to install a government more to their liking. Along the way, both encounter setbacks highlighted by Gina’s rescue of the nation’s first female president and Michael dispatching a killing machine of a man in the most innovative way I’ve ever seen.

There will be more thrillers inspired by January 6, but none of them are likely to approach the effectiveness of LEAVE NO TRACE in both form and function, in large part because Landau doesn’t dwell on the politics. Instead, he focuses on the misplaced motivation, filtered through obsessive evil, on the part of villains who live to destroy. The result is a lightning-paced thriller that pulls no punches and takes no prisoners in its frantic, non-stop romp of cross-country death and destruction. LEAVE NO TRACE is a bold, bracing and brilliant tale that blows away the rest of the field in establishing Landau as a genre force to be reckoned with. As riveting as it is relentless, this is an instant classic that is not to be missed.

You can order your copy of LEAVE NO TRACE here. Amazon USA | Amazon UK