A newly elected president faces the unexpected chance to nominate a new chief justice of the Supreme Court. His first choice is a nationally respected Court of Appeals judge, a woman whose nomination faces two serious obstacles: a long-held personal secret; and the prospect that a volatile abortion case - a trial pitting a 15-year-old girl against her pro-life parents - will come before the court. And the Senate majority leader is determined to thwart the president's nomination for reasons that cross the boundary between the political and the personal. 

When it comes to presidential campaigns, fiction can be more thrilling than truth. Such is the case in the extraordinary story of high-stakes presidential politics told in Richard North Patterson's No Safe Place.

In Dark Lady, Richard North Patterson displays the mastery of setting, psychology, and story that makes him unique among writers of suspense, and one of today's most original and enthralling novelists.

In August of 2011 an Al Qaeda operative masterminds the theft of a Pakistani military weapon: a two-hundred-pound nuclear warhead, capable of causing destruction on an unprecedented scale. A chilling transmission is then broadcast to the world, promising a major attack on a US city to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Intelligence indicates that the bomb has been smuggled out of Pakistan and is en route to the US, with Washington, D.C. or New York the likely target. But Agent Brooke Chandler knows otherwise.

Defense attorney Leland Monroe lost it all: his big-city job, his reputation, and, worst of all, his loving wife. Now he’s back in his hometown to hit restart and repair the relationship with his troubled son. But the past is always present in a small town. Leland returns to find his high school sweetheart hasn’t had the easiest of lives - especially now that her son faces a death sentence for murdering his father.