The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller

by Drew Chapman

Overview

The blistering sequel to The Ascendant: An action-packed thriller starring a bond trader turned antihero. Unlikely patriot Garrett Reilly can identify threats against America from both inside and outside the nation’s borders. But now the whole world’s economy is at risk…

Garrett Reilly sees what others do not: numbers, patterns, a nation on the brink of collapse. His unique talents saved countries from falling into a world war in The Ascendant. But it also made him a marked man―marked by terrorist groups; marked by the US Government.

In The King of Fear, Garrett recognizes a string of events that could lead to economic Armageddon in the US: banks closing, grocery shelves lying empty, the nation’s currency rendered worthless. Total chaos could engulf society within a matter of days. Garrett and the Ascendant team reunite to face enemies on all sides: a wounded Russia bent on keeping its crumbling empire in place, a cyber genius fixated on Garrett, a femme fatale willing to do anything to establish a new world order. In the midst of this, Garrett must also confront his own demons: his class rage, growing paranoia, and a dependency that he cannot seem to shake. After all, it only takes one card to make the whole house fall…

A hero with complete disregard for rules and boundaries, Drew Chapman’s rogue genius gives readers “a wild ride through the headlines of our times” (Kirkus Reviews on The Ascendant) and this sequel will not disappoint.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476725918
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Series:	King of Fear Series , #2
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Drew Chapman has written on numerous studio movies. He also directed the indie film Standoff. Currently, he creates and writes TV shows for network television, most recently working on the TNT spy show Legends. Married with two children, Chapman divides his time between Los Angeles and Seattle.

Read an Excerpt

The King of Fear

THE WHITE HOUSE, APRIL 17, 9:52 P.M.

Alan Daniels knocked twice on the door to his boss’s West Wing office, waited a moment for a response—but didn’t get one—then pushed the door open. “You got two minutes?”

The national security adviser already had her purse slung over her shoulder. She let out a long, overly dramatic sigh, then smiled brightly and nodded yes. Julie Fiore liked Daniels. He was her deputy adviser and was loyal and smart. She wanted to get home—her husband was cooking grilled salmon with a honey-mustard glaze, her favorite—but she had two minutes for Daniels. She motioned him across the room.

He laid a thin file folder on her desk. “Elections. Belarus. Early results just came in.”

“They have elections in Belarus?” She grinned mischievously.

“Apparently they do. And as of this morning”—Daniels checked the world clock on his smartphone—“one fifty-three a.m., GMT, they seem to matter.”

Fiore pulled her reading glasses out of her purse, opened the file folder, scanned the single sheet of paper inside, and frowned. “Not possible.”

“And yet”—Daniels thrust two open hands in the air as if to signify that this was something only God could fathom—“there you have it.”

“He’s been reelected four times. They believe in democracy like I believe in unicorns.” She pulled the glasses from the bridge of her nose and rubbed briefly at her eyes with her other hand. She was so tired. “How could this happen?”

“Fairy dust?”

Fiore shot Daniels a grim look.

He straightened up immediately, wiping the smile from his face. “I checked with the CIA five minutes ago. They were blindsided as well. Analysis is going to work on it overnight, lay out scenarios.”

“Good Lord. After Ukraine, this is . . . this is a disaster. . . .” Her voice trailed off as she turned away from her deputy and looked out her window to the darkened North Lawn. She tried to imagine a faraway place, halfway around the world, a building larger than the White House but just as well guarded, bathed in morning sunlight, full of ministers and generals and their counselors, all simultaneously spitting out their coffee in horror. “Over there. You know where.” She pointed up and into the darkness, as if picking a spot on an invisible map that only she and Daniels could see. “They’re having heart attacks right now. Emergency staff meetings and collective heart attacks.”

“Yes, they are. And when they recover from their heart attacks . . .” Daniels paused to consider his words. He might have couched the idea in a diplomatic euphemism, something vague and less threatening, but alone, with his boss, at the end of the day, weary and ever so slightly jumpy from monitoring the globe’s seemingly endless crises, that just didn’t seem appropriate. “They’re going to start killing people. A lot of people.”

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/14/2015
An eccentric genius is all that stands between the U.S. and total financial collapse in Chapman’s first-rate sequel to 2014’s The Ascendant. Garrett Reilly, who has a gift for detecting patterns, has put that talent to work in creating the Ascendant project, “an attempt to assemble a team of out-of-the-mainstream thinkers to help America fight the next generation of wars.” Though the program succeeded in thwarting a Chinese cyberattack, Garrett quit after suffering psychological and physical damage. Now his work as an investment analyst alerts him to another alarming problem—evidence of an “enormous pool of money” accumulated in a private equity exchange. Meanwhile, a hit woman murders the head of the New York Federal Reserve; she accuses Garrett of ordering the killing before taking her own life. The allegation puts him on the run and into the path of an elusive Russian crook who may be his intellectual equal. Chapman makes the battle of wits as suspenseful as a standard action thriller. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Ascendant:

"Chapman's novel is The Hunt for Red October meets Hackers...a must-read for international-thriller fans."
— Booklist (Starred Review)

"Fans of Homeland and 24 will love The Ascendant—a rocket of a thriller that's fresh and cool and totally real."
— Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Paranoia and Buried Secrets

“From its first page, The Ascendant pulls you into a compellingly suspenseful story, and delivers it at a break-neck pace. Drew Chapman demonstrates the assured hand of an author on his twentieth novel, not his first. I couldn’t put it down!”
— Alex Grecian, New York Times bestselling author of The Yard

“Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-savvy bond analyst. Drew Chapman is a debut novelist to watch.”
— Alafair Burke, bestselling author of If You Were Here

“Like his intriguing protagonist Garrett Reilly, author Drew Chapman possesses startling skills and this first novel just blows the doors off. The Ascendant is a rollicking, globe-hopping, timely and prescient page-turner—a Twenty-First Century thriller that once begun refuses to yield or loosen its grip on the reader. A stunning debut.

C.J. Box

2015-12-22
Terrorism, economic warfare, and "too big to fail" banks lend this thriller a sense of urgency. Who knew international economics, the Federal Reserve Bank, and a room full of geeks could be so much fun, though Chapman gave us a hint in the first novel in this series, The Ascendant (2014). Things aren't good for Garrett Reilly: constant agony from a skull fracture drives him to take painkillers by the fistful as he searches for patterns of trades in his job on Wall Street. "Seeing patterns came naturally to him; he felt them as much as saw them." And see one he does—a "dark pool" of money has been "buying and selling stocks in coordination with real-world events"—a stock would take a tumble, and then a seemingly random, unrelated crime would take place somewhere around the world. Just as Reilly notices the pattern, it sweeps him up: someone kills the president of the New York Federal Reserve, then implicates Reilly in the crime before putting a gun to her own head. The novel takes off in a hunt to find out why. Enter Russian bad guy Ilya Markov, economic assassin and Reilly's intellectual doppelgänger. Markov learns the patterns of potential pawns and uses their predictability for his master plan. Reilly knows he needs more eyes watching, researching, in order to find this expert manipulator and calls on Ascendant, his team of misfits, not happy to be together again after their first engagement with the turbulent and arrogant Reilly. Garrett puts together a profile from the crime patterns, and when a passport triggers an alert, the team focuses on Markov, who's in deep cover for a Russian-sponsored attack on the economy of the United States. He thinks like Reilly and outmaneuvers him through the twists and turns of this action-packed novel. Ascendant frantically connects the dots to Markov's ultimate target and ends up in a game of chicken. The pawn in this endgame is Alexis Truffant, Reilly's love interest from the first novel, and the gamble is breathtaking. Chapman again delivers a crisp thriller, tapping themes of our times that daily news has made commonplace. And once again he has left it open-ended, teasing us in anticipation of the next novel in series.

Kirkus Reviews

The once unthinkable financial Armageddon becomes a potential reality in Chapman’s nonstop thriller. Ably narrated by George Newbern, the audiobook demonstrates the scary reality that results when financial genius Garrett Reilly recognizes that a series of events, including the assassination of the head of the Federal Reserve, could be the beginning of a terrorist attack with the potential to destroy financial markets. Newbern brings Chapman’s plot to life with a steady newscaster-like style that grabs the listener and never lets go. When events heat up, so does the pace of Newbern’s presentation, which takes on a staccato dynamic to capture Reilly’s brilliant insights while mimicking the rhythm of the once omnipresent stock market tickertape. Listeners who enjoy a good thriller will enjoy this audiobook. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

MAY 2016 - AudioFile

The once unthinkable financial Armageddon becomes a potential reality in Chapman’s nonstop thriller. Ably narrated by George Newbern, the audiobook demonstrates the scary reality that results when financial genius Garrett Reilly recognizes that a series of events, including the assassination of the head of the Federal Reserve, could be the beginning of a terrorist attack with the potential to destroy financial markets. Newbern brings Chapman’s plot to life with a steady newscaster-like style that grabs the listener and never lets go. When events heat up, so does the pace of Newbern’s presentation, which takes on a staccato dynamic to capture Reilly’s brilliant insights while mimicking the rhythm of the once omnipresent stock market tickertape. Listeners who enjoy a good thriller will enjoy this audiobook. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

MAY 2016 - AudioFile