Forced Out - by Stephen Frey

Jack Barrett used to be a big-time scout for the New York Yankees, but now he and his daughter are barely getting by in Sarasota, Florida.  He has a new mission in life, however, when he discovers the talent of Mikey Clemant, a local minor league player who can occasionally do amazing things on the baseball field but otherwise seems to be an uninspired player with bad attitude. Johnny Bondano is a hit man for the Lucchesi crime family asked to find and kill the man blamed for killing the crime boss's only grandson.  The lives of these three men (and others affiliated with each of them) converge in ways not hard to figure out, but somewhat complicated and unexpected, nonetheless.

In my opinion, this was a good, but not great story.  It was well constructed and somewhat suspenseful.  It kept me turning the pages and wanting to find out what happened.  The ending was not exactly what I suspected.  In my personal opinion, I would not give it a raving review.  I certainly wouldn't complain about it either.  I enjoyed reading it and I'll leave it at that.

Edge - by Jeffery Deaver

Corte is an elite Federal protection officer.  In the vernacular of his agency, he is a "shepherd."  In this story, he is responsible for safeguarding the family of a Washington, D.C. police detective.  Intelligence has revealed that the "lifter," Henry Loving, who six years earlier tortured and killed Corte's mentor, Abe Fallow, is targeting them.  An academic and and aficionado of board games, Corte matches wits with Loving in a dangerous duel of strategy, deduction, deception, and calculated risk-taking.

I am not a big fan of Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series, but I loved this book.  The suspense, the action, and the pace of events combined to produce a very enjoyable plot.  The characters were well developed and interesting.  The reader experiences events from Corte's viewpoint and familiarity with the Federal officer protagonist grows as the story progresses.  I appreciated both the view into his reasoning skills that make him so good at his job and the glimpses into his background and  inferences about his personal life that make him fascinating as a person.  In my opinion, this is one of the better books that I have read recently.