Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore, The Shield

Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore have brought retired OSI agent Maxine Decker back in this follow-up to The Blade. This time Maxine is pulled out of retirement to track down some pieces of extraterrestrial tech that enemies of the U.S. are attempting to weaponize. It's been a while since I read The Blade, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed this book more. I think the storyline involving alien tech was just more interesting to me than the religious fanatic who wanted to level Las Vegas in book one. Turns out that Maxine Decker inhabits the same universe as Cotten Stone, the protagonist of the authors' previous series. References to Stone in this book were a bit jarring as they pulled me out of the narrative, but readers unfamiliar with the Cotten Stone books won't notice anything odd.