Knife Edge »

David Rollins is a former advertising creative director who lives in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Death Trust and Knife Edge, both international bestsellers. Brilliance Audio and Bantam Books will publish Knife Edge in 2008.

A KNIFE EDGE

A scientist meets a grisly end when he falls from a military research ship and is attacked by a two-ton white shark off the Japanese coast. By the time Special Investigator Vin Cooper reaches the scene, there’s literally very little left to prove that the death wasn’t an accident. But Cooper’s instincts tell him that he’s looking at murder and that in assigning him to this case someone might just as well have shoved him, too, into shark-infested waters.

What kind of top secret project could the military be engaged in that would require the services of a foremost marine biologist and a genetic researcher? The possibilities are ominous, but not as ominous as the truth.
And then the unthinkable tragedy that everyone feared since 9/11 explodes with a terrifying sense of déjà vu - in San Francisco.

Suddenly, with a second scientist presumed dead, an unidentified charred body in the morgue, and the “accidental” parachute death of a friend in a Florida training field, Cooper is following a trail as narrow and as dangerous as a knife edge - a trail that leads to what we all fear most: a secret “government” within our government whose sworn duty is to kill anyone who opposes them.

Publishers Weekly

In Rollins's second thriller, Department of Defense Special Agent Vin Cooper, behaving like James Bond on steroids, beds twice as many women, solves three times the cases and takes five times the beatings as 007. The over-the-top adventure needs a reader who can match Cooper's smart-aleck attitude. Mel Foster's measured, carefully enunciated approach produces just the opposite effect, taking the edge off of the humor and spotlighting the book's less-credible action sequences (i.e., Cooper is tossed from a plane without a parachute, is captured and beaten, escapes by donkey and is ready for a new assignment). To his credit, Foster does not stint when it comes to emotional dialogue and handles a range of accents, from Cockney to Pakistani, smoothly and effectively. And his unhurried reading clarifies a complex plot that includes a marine biologist being killed by a shark, a possible skydive suicide of Cooper's pal and the theft of a formula that could destroy all computer life on the planet. A Bantam hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 26). (Mar.)

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