Lockdown — J. Bradley Burt

In this third novel of the highly-praised Maggie Keiller/Derek Sloan series of thrillers, two armed intruders storm the local high school in Port Huntington, a small-town tourist mecca on Georgian Bay. Intent on taking revenge for the deaths of two of their friends, the men seize a number of hostages, including the school principal, Maggie Keiller, and her husband, Derek Sloan. The school goes into lockdown. In a community already divided over Indian land claims to Crown land, a mega-developer's plan to build and operate a casino on that same property, and a waste-management proposal that threatens the fragile shoreline environment, two more murders related to these issues shock and frighten the local residents. The high school hostage crisis, coming on top of everything else, stampedes events toward a heart-stopping climax. This is a first-rate, fast-paced story that no reader will want to put down---a worthy successor to the first two novels in this thrilling crime series.