The husband-and-wife duo's latest thriller, Complicit (Michael Joseph, £16.99), hurls the reader into a plot that begins with our "heroine" standing over her ex's dead body.
Agency officials were reluctant to reveal too many details, but emergency planners in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas will be tested on how well and how quickly they detect a terrorist plot that begins with a mock attack in Europe and continues with a simulated strike against the United States from plotters infiltrating the border from Mexico.
Set in lower Manhattan and Coney Island circa 1910, this wild novel is a stew of real-life and fictional gangsters, Tammany pols, labor reformers and carnival performers, all deployed in a sprawling plot that begins with the ill-advised rescue of a midget by a gangster named Kid Twist.
But by the end of the 1970s belief was growing in a huge government cover-up at Roswell, Nevada - a plot that, coincidently, began to be speculated about soon after the Watergate scandal shattered public faith in politicians.
The 27 overt acts listed in the indictment, most of which had already been reported in the press, form a narrative of a plot that, the Government says, began to unfold early in the fall of 1994.
When you look at your resume as a plot that has a beginning, middle and an end, you start to see how telling your story can be clear, concise and compelling.
This was all wrapped up in a plot that followed through from beginning to end, and also acted as a sardonic and relevant pastiche of the Bush regime and the Iraq war.
Welles and RKO Pictures faced extortion, media manipulation and other underhand tactics in a plot that was much darker and began earlier than was previously known, according to research by Harlan Lebo for a forthcoming book.
Begin with a plot that cannot decide whether its title character is its central one.
(Wouldn't their families and friends have missed them?) It's not as though having questions is a bad thing when it comes to a mystery like this, but some of my "Alcatraz" questions were about plot holes that began to loom larger the more I considered them.
