Each of us has a question we dread.

Iris Pollitt has a stock saying for these situations: Never ask me. She will use these words quite effectively throughout Jeff Abbott’s latest book. Abbott has become the master of the high-adrenaline thriller, and NEVER ASK ME is unlike any novel he has written. The setting is the upper-class Austin, Texas, suburb of Lakehaven, where everyone knows each other, even though some of them have secrets they would kill to protect.

Teenagers Ned Roberts and Julia Pollitt are taking a walk through their nearby park one morning when they come upon a horrific sight: Ned’s mother, Danielle, is seated on a park bench looking out at them. When Ned approaches her after she fails to respond to his calls, he finds that her eyes are set in a dead-on stare and she is most certainly dead. As Ned begins to wail, Julia texts her mother with a simple message: NED’S MOM IS DEAD IN PARK.

"NEVER ASK ME produces almost unbearable tension and suspense. I found myself practically hyperventilating in a rush to get through the last several chapters as [Abbott] had left one plot twist after another for me like a field of literary landmines."

Iris’ first reaction, which she keeps to herself, is “Good.” There is a history between the Pollitt and Roberts families, and not everyone knows exactly what that entails. To the outside world, Danielle was known for working in the adoption field and finding the right match for parents who wish to take in a child. She helped some of the Lakehaven residents with this task, specifically the Pollitts.

NEVER ASK ME jumps back in time to 2002 courtesy of the adoption journal that Iris kept on the recommendation of Danielle. It is within these pages that we find out all the sordid particulars of what went down just outside of St. Petersburg, Russia, when Danielle took Iris and her husband, Kyle, there to claim their little boy on whom they had spent a hefty sum. The Pollitts already had a daughter, Julia, who was born with a form of treatable cancer that has been in remission since childhood. They wanted a boy because they were no longer able to have children of their own. It was in Russia where they would take possession of the infant known as Sasha before he would head back to Austin as Grant Pollitt.

Iris states in her journal: “Never ask me how much I will love this baby.” Grant is now of high-school age, and he is aware that he was adopted and of where he originally came from. Just around the time of Danielle’s murder, Grant begins receiving strange emails with accusations about his family, stating that they are all living a lie. He becomes quite curious about the circumstances of his adoption and talks openly about returning to Russia one day to seek out his biological parents. Iris knows this can never happen. Her journal entries reference his birth parents, Boris and Anya, and the tragic circumstances surrounding the final confrontation that Iris, Kyle and Danielle had with Anya on the snowy St. Petersburg streets.

Abbott constantly peppers the narrative with new clues and players. Keep in mind that no character here, regardless of how minor a role that he or she may seem to play, is above suspicion. NEVER ASK ME produces almost unbearable tension and suspense. I found myself practically hyperventilating in a rush to get through the last several chapters as he had left one plot twist after another for me like a field of literary landmines. Readers will be kept guessing all the way to the end and most assuredly will be flipping back to some of the previous journal entries from Iris, as they contain all the answers and predicts the future events that Abbott deftly lays out for us as only he can.