This is book 25 of the "Stone Barrington" series.

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

Stone Barrington is pretty peripheral in this one. That's fine, the characters aren't very distinguished anyway, and the overall plot is interesting enough, if a little blood-thirsty.

I do think this novel is part of the trend of encouraging people to believe drastically untrue things about terrorism in general and the jihadists in particular. But so it goes.

Weird that somebody with 40 novels out, the last 28 of which were Times bestsellers, is an unfamiliar name until I stumble over him in the library. But my reading community has even less to do with the mainstream than I do.

I'm not actually sure why Jasmine, the main villain, exists. She doesn't make the bombs, she doesn't plan the attacks, she just pushes the button. And she has a remarkably well-organized network of people in multiple cities who can obtain, on short notice, any amount of modern plastic explosive, and whose bombs never fail.

I should go back earlier in the series; they're probably better.