Duel to the Death
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4.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance returns with the thirteenth pulse-pounding thriller in the “engaging and entertaining” (Los Angeles Times) Ali Reynolds series.
After taking down the man responsible for his best friend’s death, Stuart Ramey believes the case is finally closed. That is, until Stu discovers he’s been left with a multimillion dollar fortune in Bitcoin in a desperate attempt by Frigg, a rogue AI program created by the killer, to keep itself from being fully deactivated.
To take Frigg down for good, Stu enlists the help of Ali Reynolds and the rest of his cyber security colleagues at High Noon Enterprises. But they are not the only ones who know about Frigg’s existence.
Graciella Miramar, an unassuming accountant to all appearances, is actually the right-hand woman to El Pescado, the leader of a dangerous drug cartel. She’ll do anything to get her hands on that program. With Frigg’s help, Graciella hopes to take over El Pescado’s criminal underworld and become wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. But Stu—and El Pescado and his henchmen—may not be so easily defeated.
As the “grand master of the game” (The Providence Journal), J.A. Jance crafts another electrifying thriller that shows that everything has its price.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In bestseller Jance's uneven 13th Ali Reynolds novel (after 2017's Man Overboard), Frigg, an artificial intelligence, switches her allegiance from her creator, serial killer Owen Hansen, to Stuart Ramey, second-in-command at High Noon Enterprises, a cybersecurity company owned by former L.A. newscaster Ali, who plays a supporting role in this outing, and her husband in Cottonwood, Ariz. Ambitious Graciella Miramar, the daughter of Sinaloa drug lord Felix Duarte, wants to acquire Frigg who has been deactivated after switching allegiance, possibly by Stuart for her own nefarious purposes. As a ploy, Graciella offers Stuart $2.5 million, a supposed gift from Hansen (who first introduced her to Frigg) that he can't claim without reactivating Frigg. When Stuart and the others at High Noon Enterprises become aware of Graciella's connections to the drug trade and her scheme, they plot to bring down the Duarte cartel, with control of Frigg hanging in the balance. Frigg's intriguing humanlike behavior compensates only in part for a plot that never generates much suspense.)
