The Escape Artist

Jim Zigarowski spends his days preparing the bodies of American service members for burial at Dover Air Force Base. He goes by Zig. When a military transport plane goes down over Alaska, the remains of Sergeant Nola Brown reach his table. Zig knew her once: as a girl, Nola pulled his daughter from a fire at their Girl Scout camp.

The scars Nola carried from that day are missing from the corpse. Inside it, Zig finds a note addressed to her by name, tucked where no accident would leave it. The body on his table is not Nola Brown.

Nola is alive, and staying hidden. She is the Army's own combat artist, sent into the field to paint what soldiers see there rather than to fight. On her last posting she saw something nobody was meant to record, and someone wants it to stay that way.

Zig and Nola work the same mystery from opposite ends, one from a Delaware morgue and one on the run. Their separate trails meet in a decades-old military program with an unlikely root: the career of Harry Houdini. Brad Meltzer moves the story at a steady clip and grounds its conspiracy in real history rather than invention, opening a series built around these two.