Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for The Kill Box, a Mystery Thriller by Nichole Christoff (20 October 2015, Alibi, 277 pages). This is the third book in the Jamie Sinclair series.
PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below, as well as details about the whole series and our Q&A with author Nichole Christoff.
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Synopsis | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Tour Stops
Synopsis
In an intense thriller that’s perfect for fans of Lee Child or Lisa Gardner, security specialist and PI Jamie Sinclair tackles a cold case that could cost her the one person who means the most to her.Hardworking Jamie Sinclair can’t wait for the weekend. She plans to be off the clock and on the road to wine country with handsome military police officer Adam Barrett. But when a strung-out soldier takes an innocent woman hostage and forces his way into Jamie’s bedroom, everything changes. Jamie’s never seen the soldier before. But he’s no stranger to Barrett—and with one word he persuades Barrett to pack a duffel and leave Jamie in the lurch.
Jamie cannot fathom why Barrett would abandon her without explanation. But as the consequences of an unsolved crime threaten to catch up with him, a late-night phone call sends Jamie racing to Barrett’s hometown in upstate New York. In a tinderbox of shattered trust and long-buried secrets, Jamie must fight to uncover the truth about what really occurred one terrible night twenty years ago. And the secrets she discovers deep in Barrett’s past not only threaten their future together—they just might get her killed.
Teaser: Excerpt
“What kind of private investigator wears silk to a sting operation?” Marc Sandoval grumbled.
His fast hands were full of my satiny charmeuse shirt, and I fought to control a shiver as the fabric slipped along my skin. The audio technician at my elbow pressed a palm to the headphones she wore over her pixie cut as if she were listening to a classified communiqué. But she couldn’t fool me. She’d been getting a kick out of the play-by-play between Marc and me all day. And her smug smile said so.
Marc, in the meantime, gave my shirttails another tug. “Damn it, Jamie. You don’t even have room under here for a Kevlar vest.”
“I’ve got room for a listening device,” I reminded him.
And the listening device was all that mattered to me.
Beneath my blouse, taped to my chest, the microphone I wore was so sensitive, it would register my heartbeat if the thing broke away from its adhesive and slipped south along my breastbone. Its chilly wire snaked across my ribs before Marc fished its connector from the hem of my top. He snapped the end of it into a transmitter. And he clipped the transmitter to my trousers’ waistband at the small of my back. But even as the tech fired it up for another sound check, Marc’s hands hesitated like he wasn’t quite ready to let me go.
I tossed my dark ponytail over my shoulder, took a seat on the edge of the porcelain sink behind me, and shot him my best don’t-get-sappy-on-me smile. “Come on. This private investigator is a security specialist. You ordered her to look like a woman with both feet on the corporate ladder. Silk shirts are part of that look. Kevlar isn’t.”
And this was true.
Powerful women in Washington, D.C., wore elegant underpinnings, finely tailored suits, and exquisite accessories at least six days a week. Thanks to my tailored trousers and silk blouse the color of a politician’s blush, I fit perfectly into that crowd. In fact, I fit in so well, Marc had arrested me when he’d met me two weeks ago.
Because Marc Sandoval was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
And at the request of my client, I’d posed as a pharmaceutical corporation’s upper-level grunt—ready, willing, and able to bribe the Food and Drug Administration.
That’s how Marc and I came to be holed up in a closed-but-crowded ladies’ restroom in the middle of Reagan National Airport on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. His six-man tactical team, dressed head-to-toe in riot gear, knelt on the floor’s dull and dingy tiles to check over their weapons. And his communications crew fiddled with a bank of portable monitors blocking the bathroom’s row of hand-dryers. Those monitors would give us a bird’s-eye view of our approaching target: a bent FDA official named Stan Liedecker.
Before the advent of the FDA, anyone could make a profit by adding anything to food, drink, or medicine and selling it to the unsuspecting public. And I do mean they could add anything. Opium and arsenic, cocaine and copper turned up in products from cosmetics to children’s cough syrup.
But the Food and Drug Administration put a stop to all that.
Now drugs are manufactured and marketed under the FDA’s uncompromising eye. Safety has become big business. And no business is bigger than today’s pharmaceutical industry.
Case in point: Hudson Paul, my client and the chief operating officer of a firm called Pharmathon, had money to burn. Located in Tysons Corner on the edge of D.C.’s infamous Beltway, Pharmathon was one of the best and brightest drug companies in the USA. But, as Hudson explained, sitting in a guest chair in my Georgetown office, Pharmathon was also one of the top-grossing pharmaceutical companies in the entire world—with both its thumbs buried deep in the industry’s $300-billion pie.
Money that large can make people do stupid things. And Hudson had come to me because one of his top employees had done something very stupid indeed. A frustrated vice president had tried to bribe Liedecker to allow a problematic Alzheimer’s drug to bypass clinical trials—and hit the market untested—just so the competition couldn’t claim all the profits that would be up for grabs while Pharmathon worked out the kinks in its formula.
Hudson found out and fired the guy before any money changed hands. Or any patients stroked out from taking Pharmathon’s unproven pills. But that didn’t stop the situation from going from bad to worse.
One night, Liedecker, pissed that he never got his payoff, cornered Hudson in Pharmathon’s parking lot—with his hand open and itching. In no uncertain terms, he invited Hudson to pay up so he’d hush up. And if my client didn’t meet the blackmail demand, Liedecker promised to use his FDA clout to shut down Pharmathon in its entirety—and see Hudson Paul charged as the brain behind the vice president’s attempted bribery.
I took Hudson’s case and posed as his most trusted employee. Near a hamburger stand on the National Mall, I met with Stan Liedecker to talk terms. But unbeknownst to me, Marc Sandoval had the man under surveillance.
And Marc was damn good at his job.
So he arrested me before I reached my parking spot.
When Marc learned I was a PI, he’d thundered like a fallen angel. But after he’d read me the riot act, it dawned on him: Stan Liedecker believed I would buy him off. So if Marc allowed me to give Liedecker his cash, Marc could arrest the bastard with dirt on his hands.
Marc’s own hands were quick and strong. I’d found that out when he announced he’d wire me up himself. With the self-assurance of a neurosurgeon, he’d loosened the impeccable knot in his ruby-red tie, rolled up the sleeves of his made-to-measure dress shirt, and ordered me to unbutton my clothes. But despite Marc’s overabundance of confidence, I didn’t miss the crease of concern marring his forehead. Or the way he kept muttering about me and Kevlar.
“Relax,” I told him. “I don’t need Kevlar. Liedecker’s harmless, and I’ve got you and your team to back me up.”
“Just don’t test that theory, all right?”
Marc sent the sound tech on her way, snatched my charcoal-gray suit coat from a hook on the tiled wall, and handled it with all the finesse of a bullfighter. When he helped me into it, his fingertips lingered on my lapels. And if I didn’t know better, I’d have said the evening star sparkled in his obsidian eye.
“Be careful, Jamie.”
“I’m always careful,” I replied.
And I meant it.
Marc opened his mouth to say something more. But an agent manning a monitor interrupted him. “Time to boogie.”
His fast hands were full of my satiny charmeuse shirt, and I fought to control a shiver as the fabric slipped along my skin. The audio technician at my elbow pressed a palm to the headphones she wore over her pixie cut as if she were listening to a classified communiqué. But she couldn’t fool me. She’d been getting a kick out of the play-by-play between Marc and me all day. And her smug smile said so.
Marc, in the meantime, gave my shirttails another tug. “Damn it, Jamie. You don’t even have room under here for a Kevlar vest.”
“I’ve got room for a listening device,” I reminded him.
And the listening device was all that mattered to me.
Beneath my blouse, taped to my chest, the microphone I wore was so sensitive, it would register my heartbeat if the thing broke away from its adhesive and slipped south along my breastbone. Its chilly wire snaked across my ribs before Marc fished its connector from the hem of my top. He snapped the end of it into a transmitter. And he clipped the transmitter to my trousers’ waistband at the small of my back. But even as the tech fired it up for another sound check, Marc’s hands hesitated like he wasn’t quite ready to let me go.
I tossed my dark ponytail over my shoulder, took a seat on the edge of the porcelain sink behind me, and shot him my best don’t-get-sappy-on-me smile. “Come on. This private investigator is a security specialist. You ordered her to look like a woman with both feet on the corporate ladder. Silk shirts are part of that look. Kevlar isn’t.”
And this was true.
Powerful women in Washington, D.C., wore elegant underpinnings, finely tailored suits, and exquisite accessories at least six days a week. Thanks to my tailored trousers and silk blouse the color of a politician’s blush, I fit perfectly into that crowd. In fact, I fit in so well, Marc had arrested me when he’d met me two weeks ago.
Because Marc Sandoval was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
And at the request of my client, I’d posed as a pharmaceutical corporation’s upper-level grunt—ready, willing, and able to bribe the Food and Drug Administration.
That’s how Marc and I came to be holed up in a closed-but-crowded ladies’ restroom in the middle of Reagan National Airport on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. His six-man tactical team, dressed head-to-toe in riot gear, knelt on the floor’s dull and dingy tiles to check over their weapons. And his communications crew fiddled with a bank of portable monitors blocking the bathroom’s row of hand-dryers. Those monitors would give us a bird’s-eye view of our approaching target: a bent FDA official named Stan Liedecker.
Before the advent of the FDA, anyone could make a profit by adding anything to food, drink, or medicine and selling it to the unsuspecting public. And I do mean they could add anything. Opium and arsenic, cocaine and copper turned up in products from cosmetics to children’s cough syrup.
But the Food and Drug Administration put a stop to all that.
Now drugs are manufactured and marketed under the FDA’s uncompromising eye. Safety has become big business. And no business is bigger than today’s pharmaceutical industry.
Case in point: Hudson Paul, my client and the chief operating officer of a firm called Pharmathon, had money to burn. Located in Tysons Corner on the edge of D.C.’s infamous Beltway, Pharmathon was one of the best and brightest drug companies in the USA. But, as Hudson explained, sitting in a guest chair in my Georgetown office, Pharmathon was also one of the top-grossing pharmaceutical companies in the entire world—with both its thumbs buried deep in the industry’s $300-billion pie.
Money that large can make people do stupid things. And Hudson had come to me because one of his top employees had done something very stupid indeed. A frustrated vice president had tried to bribe Liedecker to allow a problematic Alzheimer’s drug to bypass clinical trials—and hit the market untested—just so the competition couldn’t claim all the profits that would be up for grabs while Pharmathon worked out the kinks in its formula.
Hudson found out and fired the guy before any money changed hands. Or any patients stroked out from taking Pharmathon’s unproven pills. But that didn’t stop the situation from going from bad to worse.
One night, Liedecker, pissed that he never got his payoff, cornered Hudson in Pharmathon’s parking lot—with his hand open and itching. In no uncertain terms, he invited Hudson to pay up so he’d hush up. And if my client didn’t meet the blackmail demand, Liedecker promised to use his FDA clout to shut down Pharmathon in its entirety—and see Hudson Paul charged as the brain behind the vice president’s attempted bribery.
I took Hudson’s case and posed as his most trusted employee. Near a hamburger stand on the National Mall, I met with Stan Liedecker to talk terms. But unbeknownst to me, Marc Sandoval had the man under surveillance.
And Marc was damn good at his job.
So he arrested me before I reached my parking spot.
When Marc learned I was a PI, he’d thundered like a fallen angel. But after he’d read me the riot act, it dawned on him: Stan Liedecker believed I would buy him off. So if Marc allowed me to give Liedecker his cash, Marc could arrest the bastard with dirt on his hands.
Marc’s own hands were quick and strong. I’d found that out when he announced he’d wire me up himself. With the self-assurance of a neurosurgeon, he’d loosened the impeccable knot in his ruby-red tie, rolled up the sleeves of his made-to-measure dress shirt, and ordered me to unbutton my clothes. But despite Marc’s overabundance of confidence, I didn’t miss the crease of concern marring his forehead. Or the way he kept muttering about me and Kevlar.
“Relax,” I told him. “I don’t need Kevlar. Liedecker’s harmless, and I’ve got you and your team to back me up.”
“Just don’t test that theory, all right?”
Marc sent the sound tech on her way, snatched my charcoal-gray suit coat from a hook on the tiled wall, and handled it with all the finesse of a bullfighter. When he helped me into it, his fingertips lingered on my lapels. And if I didn’t know better, I’d have said the evening star sparkled in his obsidian eye.
“Be careful, Jamie.”
“I’m always careful,” I replied.
And I meant it.
Marc opened his mouth to say something more. But an agent manning a monitor interrupted him. “Time to boogie.”
The Kill Box
Available 20 October 2015!
UK: 
US:
The Series: Jamie Sinclair
The Kill List | The Kill Shot |Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.
The Kill List [1]
In this taut debut thriller, Nichole Christoff introduces a savvy private investigator with nerves of steel—and a shattered heart.
As a top private eye turned security specialist, Jamie Sinclair has worked hard to put her broken marriage behind her. But when her lying, cheating ex-husband, army colonel Tim Thorp, calls with the news that his three-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, he begs Jamie to come find her. For the sake of the child, Jamie knows she can’t refuse. Now, despite the past, she’ll do everything in her power to bring little Brooke Thorp home alive.
Soon Jamie is back at Fort Leeds—the army base in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where she grew up, the only child of a two-star general—chasing down leads and forging an uneasy alliance with the stern military police commander and the exacting FBI agent working Brooke’s case. But because Jamie’s father is now a U.S. senator, her recent run-in with a disturbed stalker is all over the news, and when she starts receiving gruesome threats echoing the stalker’s last words, she can’t shake the feeling that her investigation may be about more than a missing girl—and that someone very powerful is hiding something very significant . . . and very sinister.
[Published 2 December 2014, 279 pages]
The Kill Shot [2]
In an explosive thriller for readers of Lee Child, Alex Berenson, and Brad Taylor, P.I. and security specialist Jamie Sinclair finds herself caught in a dangerous game of international cat-and-mouse.
Jamie Sinclair’s father has never asked her for a favor in her life. The former two-star general turned senator is more in the habit of giving his only child orders. So when he requests Jamie’s expertise as a security specialist, she can’t refuse—even though it means slamming the brakes on her burgeoning relationship with military police officer Adam Barrett. Just like that, Jamie hops aboard a flight to London with a U.S. State Department courier carrying a diplomatic pouch in an iron grip.
Jamie doesn’t have to wait long to put her unique skills to good use. When she and the courier are jumped by goons outside the Heathrow terminal, Jamie fights them off—but the incident puts her on high alert. Someone’s willing to kill for the contents of the bag. Then a would-be assassin opens fire in crowded Covent Garden, and Jamie is stunned to spot a familiar face: Adam Barrett, who saves her life with a single shot and calmly slips away. Jamie’s head—and her heart—tell her that something is very wrong. But she’s come way too far to turn back now.
[Published 17 March 2015, 289 pages]
About the Author
Nichole Christoff is a writer, broadcaster, and military spouse who has worked on air and behind the scenes producing and promoting content for radio, television news, and the public relations industry across the United States and Canada.
Nic's first manuscript won the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart®. Her second won the Helen McCloy-Mystery Writers of America Scholarship. Nic has also been named as a finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense and Killer Nashville's Claymore Dagger.
Nic has sipped champagne at the birthday celebration of His Majesty, the King of Thailand, played party games at the residence of the British High Commissioner, and learned to make sushi from the chef to His Excellency, the Ambassador of Japan. When she isn't penning her latest novel, Nic teaches Creative Writing at a small, private university.
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Tour Stops
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Oct 13: I Heart Reading
Oct 13: Author C.A. Milson’s Blog ☀
Oct 14: BooksChatter ☀ℚ
Oct 15: Reading Reality ✍
Oct 15: Books on Fire ☀
Oct 16: Mignon Mykel Reviews ✍
Oct 17: Compelling Beasts Blog ℚ
Oct 20: Journey of a Bookseller ✍
Oct 20: Jen’s Reading Obsession ✍
Oct 13: Author C.A. Milson’s Blog ☀
Oct 14: BooksChatter ☀ℚ
Oct 15: Reading Reality ✍
Oct 15: Books on Fire ☀
Oct 16: Mignon Mykel Reviews ✍
Oct 17: Compelling Beasts Blog ℚ
Oct 20: Journey of a Bookseller ✍
Oct 20: Jen’s Reading Obsession ✍
Oct 22: Splashes Into Books ✍
Oct 27: Bless Their Hearts Mom ✍
Oct 30: The Book Breeze ✍
Nov 2: Queen of All She Reads ✍ℚ
Nov 6: Room with Books
Nov 10: Cara Correnti’s Blog ☀
Nov 11: Book About ℚ
Nov 12: Literary Musings ℚ
Oct 27: Bless Their Hearts Mom ✍
Oct 30: The Book Breeze ✍
Nov 2: Queen of All She Reads ✍ℚ
Nov 6: Room with Books
Nov 10: Cara Correnti’s Blog ☀
Nov 11: Book About ℚ
Nov 12: Literary Musings ℚ
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