POINT BLANK by Catherine Coulter

I have a little time between deadlines now so I dug into the latest bag of books a friend gave me and pulled out this Catherine Coulter paperback.  It's one of her FBI thrillers so I knew I would enjoy it.  Her star characters, FBI agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, are married now and have a son.  They are like old friends.  I can count on their adventures being both scary and full of relationships that captivate me.

Point Blank begins with their colleague Ruth Warnecki caving in Virginia as she follows an old treasure map she found in a 19th century book.  Supposedly Union soldiers intercepted a shipment of gold headed for General Robert E. Lee in 1863.  They decided to hide part of that gold to recover after the end of the war.  As she searches, following that map, she is suddenly conscious of a strange odor and is driven mad by hallucinations.  She wakes up much later when a dog finds her lying unconscious in a wooded area in newly fallen snow.  The local sheriff, following his dog, saves her.  

The dog is one of my favorite characters in this book.  A little poodle named Brewster, when he gets excited, he pees all over whoever is trying to calm him down.  He provides laughs in times of worry.

Ruth has amnesia but as soon as she is identified, Savich and Sherlock hurry to her side and they join the search to discover who drugged her and took her from the cave.  Brewster of course gets really excited with all these people in the house.

Savich and Sherlock had been investigating a pair of criminals, two of the worst people on the planet who are apparently intent on killing Savich and maybe Sherlock too.  As they follow both cases, the thrills and chills are many, but there is also the growing relationship between Ruth and the sheriff and his two teenage sons.  He is a widower and lonely, funny how that works out.

Excellent thriller with a touch of romance, and great characters.

Highly recommended
Source:  book trade with friend