Breakthrough
(Julian Palmer #3)
The disappearance of a beautiful banker. The appearance of a mysterious canister –that people are too willing to die for. It’s a “breakthrough” – and a threat.
Detective Julian Palmer is taking a break from homicide-or so she thinks. Signing on to assist in a simple insurance investigation, she soon finds herself enmeshed in something far more elaborate. It's a bizarre case, one that leads her from a dead investment banker with a mysterious briefcase, to a renegade inventor in the New Mexico desert, and ultimately, to the investing frenzy of Wall Street in the late 1990's. It also leads her to an unexpected romance with Tom Hartley-a man as lonely as Julian, and as passionate about uncovering the truth.
Welcome to the twists, turns and switchbacks that are Jonathan Stone's trademark. A world of puzzles and mirrors, where the possibilities move as fast as the characters. Where the trail goes from cold to warm to searing hot. And where a beautiful young banker seems to wield more power dead than alive.
In Jonathan Stone's Breakthrough, the collars may be white, but the blood still runs red
“In the genre of mystery, this latest from Stone is nothing less than a brilliant masterpiece….Combining a puzzle of genius proportions, along with questions of existence, isolation, becoming and ending, this tale has it all…Don’t miss this one, it’s the most luminous and breathtaking read of the year.”
— New Mystery Reader
“The delicious twists are satisfying in the end…”
— Publishers Weekly
“The best yet . . . Plot twists abound in this suspenseful story.”
— Booklist
Sample of Breakthrough
Tom Hartley awoke to find himself being touched by a beautiful woman he’d never seen before.
In any litany of life’s surprises, this one would rate extremely highly. But as so often occurred in the forty years of Tom Hartley’s life, circumstance conspired to render the reality far short of the hope.
Because the parts that were touching were their knees.
Which might still have held promise: the knee after all can have its own erogenous qualities, leading as it does auspiciously up the thigh. At the moment, however, Tom’s knee was cloaked in mail-order khaki. And the young woman’s knee was sheathed in a layer of prim white pantyhose, and further protected by a corporate mufti blue skirt descending appropriately below it. And while Tom held every conviction that the knee and the thigh beyond it were as worthy of close scrutiny and unbridled esteem as the rest of her so startlingly seemed to be, the young woman’s knees and thighs were for now covered not only by the blue skirt, and beneath that—undoubtedly—the extension of the white pantyhose, but additionally by a stout stack of manila folders and thick documents spread across them.
Tom understood instantly what had happened. In the stifling train car air and heat, waiting to depart from Grand Central, he had fallen asleep. She had boarded later— no doubt at the last moment, her time at a premium—hurried and pressed and preoccupied, he imagined, with whatever she was working on so furiously now. It was the only way he would ever have found himself in such proximity to someone like her.