Face Off, edited by David Baldacci

[Smokey]

Edited by David Baldacci, Face Off (Simon and Schuster, June 2014) offers eleven short stories each written by two well-known thriller writers. Each author has selected one of his or her characters to feature in the story. These characters cooperate to address the central puzzle or crime or problem set out in the piece. For instance, Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenize teams up with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch in "Red Eye".

Face Off is one of the better efforts out of a number of published volumes of short stories that use the two author-one story hook. "Red Eye" is a nice glimpse of how it might work out if Bosch traveled to Boston and ended up working with Kenzie on a case. Lincoln Rhyme, created by Jeffery Deaver, and Lucas Davenport, John Sandford's detective, combine their styles nicely in "Rhymes with Prey" after an initial bit of suspicion.

The stories cover an entertaining spectrum of sub- genres within the board field of the thriller. "The Devil's Bones" teaming up Steve Berry's Cotton Malone and James Rollins' Gray Pierce, is action adventure, while "Infernal Night" partnering Heather Graham's Michael Quinn and F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack has a paranormal element. "Surfing the Panther" features an association between lawyers Paul Madriani (Steve Martini, creator) and Alexandra Cooper (Linda Fairstein, creator).

For the most part, characters maintain their established personas and, behave believably even when away from their home base, that is their interactions don't seem forced or strained.

The book is a project of International Thriller Writers (ITW), and all of the authors are ITW members. It makes a reality of the concept which is, as Baldacci writes in the Introduction, to: "Take iconic writers with iconic characters and face them off against each other." The end result is iconic writers and iconic characters playing very nicely with each other for the thriller reader's entertainment.