With his eleventh novel, the slick techie thriller Trust Me, Austinite Jeff Abbott posits what everyone fears to be true: that crazies lurking on the World Wide Web will someday emerge from the cybershadows and make very bad things happen. University of Texas grad student Luke Dantry uncovers just such a terrorist network, the Night Road, while working for his stepfather, Henry Shawcross, whose Washington think tank is trying to flush violent extremists out of hiding on the Internet. Luke’s untroubled world is shaken when he gets abducted and framed for a street-corner murder in Houston; though he escapes, he suspects Henry has a connection to the kidnapper. After the Night Road blows up a chlorine tanker train outside Houston, Luke learns about a bigger attack, code-named Hellfire—a doomsday scenario for certain—and with no one he can trust (there’s that word), the 24-year-old suddenly becomes the final line of defense against a global calamity. Trust Me nails every thriller element, from genuinely unpredictable story twists to a creepy subplot about the plane crash that killed Luke’s birth father (hint: he was no ordinary college professor). Abbott turns a threadbare premise—terrorists under the bed—into a surefire adrenaline rush for the summer season. Dutton, $25.95
