While visiting Denver to make a presentation at a conference, FBI Agent Maggie O'Dell takes a detour to western Nebraska to look into mysterious cattle mutilations but quickly finds herself responding to an emergency call. A group of teenagers are found in the nearby woods--most of them incoherent and two of them dead by apparent electrocution. Maggie soon learns that the teens were experimenting with salvia, and has to struggle to discern the facts from their eyewitness accounts of the deaths, which bear an unsettling resemblance to the mutilated cattle. Then, just as she starts to make progress, someone starts picking off the survivors.
Meanwhile, Maggie's partner, R.J. Tully, and friend Colonel Benjamin Platt are called on to investigate food contamination at an elementary school in Virginia. More than 100 schoolchildren recover from their food poisoning, only to become ill again, making it clear to Platt that this is outbreak is not caused by a typical pathogen. Platt's fight to uncover the truth and save the children and Maggie's race to find a killer are soon tightly and inextricably woven together in Alex Kava's latest compelling thrill ride. Kava excels at bringing her characters to life and making the background jump off the page--sometimes with gruesome detail. Her treatment of fictional Washington politics is so authentic that it threatens to turn the healthiest skeptic into a conspiracy theorist. With characters so real and plots so disturbingly plausible, Hotwire is impossible to put down. --Sarah Borders, librarian, Houston Public Library