The House of Secrets

April 25, 2016
Bestseller Meltzer (The Fifth Assassin) and Goldberg (Gangsterland) launch a series with a conspiracy-laden spy novel that’s at its best when it’s gleefully cutting the legs out from the genre’s tropes. After a car accident in Los Angeles, Hazel-Ann Nash wakes up to find that much of her memory—particularly around anything she had an emotional connection to—is lost, her father is dead, and an FBI agent is asking questions. Her father, Jack, was the host of a cult TV show investigating the unexplained, and he was personally obsessed with Benedict Arnold’s Bible. Meanwhile, a mysterious man known only as the Bear travels to Dubai to kill a man named Kennedy, and the body of another man named Nixon is found in Canada. The authors toss plenty of conspiracy novel zaniness into the mix, but they also temper things nicely, even as the tensions escalate. The result is slight, but it’s also highly satisfying. Agents: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME (Meltzer); Jennie Dunham at Dunham Literary (Goldberg).

June 1, 2016
Meltzer (The President's Shadow, 2015, etc.) and Goldberg (Gangsterland, 2014, etc.) team up to uncover a vast international conspiracy tracing its roots back to everyone's favorite turncoat, Benedict Arnold.When she regains consciousness in a Los Angeles hospital eight days after her father died behind the wheel of a car she and her brother were riding in, there are a lot of things Hazel-Ann Nash doesn't remember. But she does remember that 30 years ago, when she was only 6, Jack Nash, host of the TV conspiracy-investigation series The House of Secrets, posed her a riddle: how did a Bible originally belonging to Benedict Arnold make its way into the chest cavity of a dead man nearly 200 years ago? Since Skip Nash, whom his father had featured on the show for years, is clearly planning to deal with Jack's death in his own way, Hazel responds to FBI agent Trevor Rabkin's news that her father was poisoned with the villainous toxin Polosis 5 a few days after meeting with Spokane maintenance engineer Darren Nixon, another victim of Polosis 5, by deciding to investigate on her own. Rabkin has his own ideas about that decision as well as the resources to back them up. Half a world away, an assassin called The Bear is making his own plans, which involve killing New Haven realtor Arthur Kennedy, dressing him in a Continental Army uniform, leaving him in a ditch in Dubai, and luring Skip to Kennedy's hotel. Things get more complicated, then more rational, but never remotely believable."When you've faced the impossible, it's usually because someone's lying," the traumatized heroine is assured. True enough. The apparently formidable premise behind this tale dissolves in a shower of lies, and the ambitious plot sags as the principals crisscross the globe pumping up their frequent flier miles.

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May 1, 2016
Hazel Nash and her brother, Skip, were nearly killed in a car accident. Their father, Jack, was at the wheel but didn't survive. Recovering in the hospital, Hazel is visited by an FBI agent, who tells her that another man is dead, and apparently Jack Nash was with him shortly before he died; strangely, the dead man had a book sewn inside him, a Bible that once belonged to Benedict Arnold. If this all sounds a little loopy, you should also know that Jack Nash was the host of a long-running television series that explored conspiracies and the like (similar, apparently, to coauthor Meltzer's own TV show, History Decoded). The big mystery here is whether Arnold was in fact a traitor, as history has branded him, or whether he was actually a triple agent, not an enemy of the U.S. but a hero. Meltzer's many fans should have a good time here, as will all conspiracy-minded readers, even those not familiar with the author's brand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)