In Full Color

“Readers who take this novel to the beach this summer will never make it into the water,” Anthony Rainone cautions today in his review for January Magazine of Whitewash, the latest standalone from Nebraska author Alex Kava. Whitewash, Rainone opines, is a “white hot” thriller.

Kava’s tale, as Rainone (a regular Rap Sheet contributor) lays it out, builds around both the development of a thermal conversion process, which “converts refuse and other waste material” into oil, and the people who either want to take credit for that development--or want to stop it in its tracks. Players in these pages include the scientific head of a northern Florida alternative-fuel production facility, who’s recently gone missing; a U.S. senator who hopes to be recognized “as a frontrunner on environmental issues,” but whose future may have been compromised by his hardworking chief of staff’s one-night-stand with another senatorial aide--a liaison that put the man in place to become a murder suspect; another scientist at the fuel plant, whose curiosity about unusual activities there makes her the target of a very “human and comical” hit man; and a Middle Eastern terrorist who plots to make a political statement that will convince America not to withdraw its longstanding investment in his homeland’s oil industry.

You can read all of Rainone’s January Magazine review here.