The prequel to Downing's World War II Berlin-set "Station" series, Wedding Station introduces John Russell, an English crime reporter at a Berlin newspaper whose grim tales of everyday mayhem are increasingly swallowed by the darkness descending upon Germany under new chancellor Hitler. Graham's latest stand-alone, Danger in Numbers, a state police agent links arms with an FBI specialist on cults to solve a ritualistic murder in small-town northern Florida (125,000-copy first printing). In Kayode's Lightseekers, Nigerian investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo travels to a remote town in his country's south to probe the public torture and murder of three university students in what he comes to realize is a lot more than a moment of crowd madness. In her #ownvoices debut, London-based criminal attorney Matheson, of the City University Crime Writing competition, sets DI Anjelica Henley the unenviable task of stopping a criminal imitating The Jigsaw Man before the real hack-up-his-victims killer gets the copycat himself (100,000-copy first printing). In The Red Book, from Patterson and Illinois justice/Edgar Award winner Ellis (Line of Vision), Det. Bill Harney of the Chicago PD's Special Operations Section is fresh on the job and walking the finest of lines when the turmoil surrounding a drive-by shooting turns political (520,000-copy first printing). In Rollins's Kingdom of Bones, Sigma Force faces huge swaths of Africa where the populace has turned quiescent even as plants and animals become cunningly fierce; has the biosphere run amok or is fiendish engineering involved (250,000-copy first printing)?

In the new Sigma Force thriller, Commander Gray Pierce and his team of globetrotting problem-solvers run up against something they aren't sure how to handle. In a part of the Congo, the environment seems to have been altered. Flora and fauna are apparently undergoing some sort of accelerated evolution; at the same time, the people there seem to have taken several steps backwards on the evolutionary ladder, making them unresponsive and virtually immobile. Is it possible someone has intentionally caused these catastrophic events? And, if so, why? As usual, the answer lies deep in the past, and Sigma Force is running out of time to solve the ancient mystery. The Sigma Force novels (this is the sixteenth) are muscular, dynamic action-adventures. But this doesn't mean they skimp on character: Rollins knows just when to slow things down and let us get to know the players. He's very good at this sort of thing, and his fans will surely be lining up for this one.

A plague threatens to burst from the Congolese jungle and infect the world in the latest bloodcurdling adventure in the Sigma Force series. "Stay away. Dear God, don't come out here": That's the warning ignored by Sigma Force's Tucker Wayne and his faithful soldier dog, Kane. Near Kisangani, "the literal heart of Africa," a fearful contagion runs amok. Scientists and locals suffer attacks from crazed ants, bats, and myriad other jungle fauna. Some of the populace becomes nearly catatonic--what's going on? The answer appears to be viruses, those half-living creatures said to outnumber all the stars in the universe. An infected moth lands on skin with bloodcurdling effect. Baboons go crazy and tear people apart. Ants develop spikes, as though their mandibles aren't enough for ripping into flesh. The normally cranky hippos are even crankier. And "the deeper we go, the worse it will get." The evil mining CEO Nolan De Coster loves all of this--he wants a massive pandemic in which he can become the savior, but he's not all the good guys have to worry about. Even the flora fight them. They encounter intelligent fungi and angry trees as they get closer and closer to Mfupa Ufalme, the accursed Kingdom of Bones. Thriller readers love ticking clocks, and this yarn has several, like the timer on the mother of all bombs that is going to explode any minute now. The story is a well-mixed blend of action, science, and occasionally over-the-top imagination. That bats are "furry sacks of viruses" is an easy sell--judgmental trees, not so much. Readers will like the characters, especially the brave Kane and Benjamin Frey, the biologist with an eidetic memory and mild Asperger's. This excursion into the depths of Africa is more enjoyable than Conrad's Heart of Darkness, although it gets a little gross in spots. This one's fast-moving fun. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bestseller Rollins's exhilarating 16th Sigma Force novel (after 2020's The Last Odyssey) takes a Sigma Force team, including former Army Ranger Tucker Wayne, to a UN refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been overwhelmed by a simultaneous invasion of unusually violent insects and animals and an outbreak of a mysterious and devastating sickness. Their mission, which is to identify and combat what officials fear could be another worldwide pandemic, becomes a literal rescue as the camp is attacked by corrupt Congolese forces at the behest of an industrial-mining billionaire with a sinister agenda. Wayne and the other Sigma team members must travel deep into the primeval jungle in search of the Kingdom of Bones, a fabled ancient Shangri-La that might provide the cure to the disease, if they can survive the deadly mutating flora and fauna. Rollins, a former veterinarian, excels in description of animal taxonomy, both real and of his own invention. Fans of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton won't want to miss this one. Agents: Russ Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency; and Danny Baror, Baror International. (Apr.)