The Falcon
The Falcon (Nina Guerrera #3)
By: Isabella Maldonado
[On my list for Most Anticipated Books of 2022]
“You can’t beat a raptor into submission. You must work with its natural behavior to bend it to your will.”
If you haven’t read this series before, you’ll want to read it from the beginning: 1) The Cipher and 2) A Different Dawn. And I would highly recommend doing so!
If you’re already familiar with this series then you know that our female protagonist, Nina, former street cop, works with a special FBI team made up of Breck, a computer wiz, Kent, a former Navy SEAL, and Wade, a criminal profiler.
In The Falcon, the team is back in Phoenix, AZ working on another series of murders.
Young women are being abducted from the AIT campus. No bodies have been found and no suspects have been investigated.
A break in the case leads them to all but one of the missing girls, all in different states of mummification. As their investigation progresses, they discover the culprit not only has an obsession with Egyptian rituals and culture, but has knowledge of falconry training and is himself searching for a mate that he will tame and train to love him back.
“This guy is an expert in training. Conditioning. Manipulation.”
“Falconry taught him patience, wisdom, and self-mastery.”
“He tries to control what he cannot understand. The frustration mounts as he repeatedly fails.”
Just like The Cipher, the mind of The Falcon is pretty twisted.
The team becomes extra invested when the next girl to be taken is Nina’s neighbor and ‘surrogate daughter’ Bianca who has been touring AIT to attend there in the fall.
I had suspected in book two that Bianca was going to be joining the team in some capacity in the future, but I hadn’t anticipated her being the victim. I still wonder if she will indirectly assist the team in every book. She’s their secret weapon! And as I had hoped from book two, Bianca did use less f-words so that was nice.
There was some swearing here or there but nothing distracting and excessive.
There was also some technical jargon and explanations that wasn’t super clear, but even if you didn’t understand it, you knew the overall purpose of what the action was going to do and it didn’t take away from the story.
The connection to Egyptian mythology and rituals was interesting but I couldn’t stop thinking about the comment one of our museum tour guides said as we were visiting the Vatican Museum. We had limited time and he had us bypass the Egyptian exhibit saying, “Egypt matters for nothing!”
So if you feel as strongly as our tour guide, you may not enjoy that aspect of this book!
Another random tidbit from my life that is fractionally relevant— the killer gives ostrich feathers to the girls after he kills them because of Egyptian mythology, but they talk about how there’s a lot of ostrich farms in Arizona. I lived there for one year and it just so happened that the annual ostrich festival was being held the weekend of my birthday! They had a parade with ostriches and they did ostrich racing as well. So I feel a special connection to Arizonan ostriches. The end.
I’ve recommended this series to many people and I do so again here. I love the characters and character development (we see Nina and Kent become much closer in this book) as a team and also Nina individually as she continues to work through her hard past.
I love that book two gave Nina a new family, but then it leaves me wondering about the other members of the team. It never seems like they have anything to do or think about other than being with Nina and doing their work. Maybe that’s common in the FBI given the nature of the job? I don’t necessarily want Maldonado to invest more page real estate to all the other character’s families, but it would be nice to know they had lives too.
The writing is suspenseful and reads fast! Maldonado’s expertise in law enforcement and the FBI is very evident in her books and I feel like it’s pretty realistic. And her characters usually don’t go off on stupid ‘hero moments’ without notifying the team so I appreciate that too!
This book releases June 28, 2022, so keep this one on your radar this year! The release date gives you plenty of time to read the first two books in preparation.
Over and out.
Sidenote: I get a kick out of her book covers all having someone running away and looking at other books I’ve read, I’ve realized that it’s more common than I thought. So check out my blog this month because I’ll be doing a post of more books with covers like that!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
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