In the near future, the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v. Wade, strengthened the Patriot Act, and dismissed the Fourth Amendment. Devlin Harrison, the second African American president, is a liberal, but the court's conservatives plan to outlast him. Then conservative justice Henry Venter is shot and killed in a D.C. restaurant. Enter former Secret Service Agent Joe Reeder, who took a bullet while guarding a president. Hailed as a hero, he made the mistake of expressing his opposition to that president's neocon politics and quickly became a pariah. His only remaining federal-cop friend is FBI Agent Gabe Sloan, and Sloan, valuing Reeder's insight, adds Reeder as a consultant to the multiagency task force investigating Venter's murder. Soon a second conservative justice is killed, and the mastermind behind the crimes may be just getting started. Collins (Ask Not, 2013), perhaps best known for his Nathan Heller novels, has crafted a spiky thriller with a fine inside-the-Beltway sensibility. His politics are transparent enough to cost him conservative readers, but the sense is that Collins is probably OK with that.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

At the start of this unsatisfying political thriller set a decade in the future, two masked gunmen invade the Verdict Chophouse, a Washington, D.C., restaurant, where Supreme Court Associate Justice Henry Venter, who led the successful effort to overturn Roe v. Wade under President Gregory Watson Bennett (Obama's Republican successor), and other top government officials are eating unguarded. One of the robbers shoots Venter dead after the judge makes a sudden move. When former Secret Service agent Joseph Reeder, who took a bullet for Bennett, views a video of the murder, he concludes that Venter was the target all along in what was meant to look like a robbery gone wrong. Reeder joins a task force investigating the crime. Other implausible security lapses and a completely predictable ending add up to a work well below Collins's best, like his Nate Heller series (Ask Not, etc.). Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.