Perhaps AI could offer an alternative spelling to thriller: Hunsicker, whose THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ROSE DOUCETTE was shortlisted for the 2025 Thriller Award and was my Top Pick in the Bookreporter Reviewers’ Favorite Books of 2024 feature. Harry Hunsicker sets the thriller crossbar at stratospheric heights, which he vaults in this emotionally charged tale of a mother’s interminable bond with her child.

At age 18, Meg Dalton escorts three-year-old Ivy to a Texas county fair. They meet Ivy’s father, Rusty, at the Ferris wheel, when a parade of over-imbibed rowdy revelers sweeps by, and Ivy vanishes.

"Meg spelled backward is Gem, something of great value or excellence. MOTHER MAY I is the Gem in Harry Hunsicker’s crown of 10 audacious novels."

Earning the dubious moniker “Mad Meg” 15 years later, she is on the brink of being fired from “the Company” that walks lockstep with government Alphabet Soup agencies. “Think of me as a soldier or a spy for hire.” But she crossed a line by shooting someone she shouldn’t have. As the guillotine blade is about to fall, Meg receives a text reprieve. She’s needed for a covert mission in Los Angeles. The assignment turns into a fatal FUBAR when she spies someone wearing a silver butterfly necklace, “[t]he same piece of jewelry that Ivy had been wearing when she disappeared.”

The only other woman working for the Company is Daisy, whom Meg thought “was certifiably batsh**. Fortunately, she was exceptionally good at her job.” Meg and Daisy are on the lam from their boss, Elvis, who had earned his alias due to his muttonchop sideburns. He also was known to terminate those who crossed him by pushing them out of helicopters. The pair find themselves in more pickles than a Vlasic processing plant.

Plot threads that resemble wicker strands lead readers on a crisscross map from Los Angeles to Miami. And all roads lead to “the Dark Lords, a motorcycle gang started by a sociopath” in Austin. The cabal members have more brawn than brains. “They’d established a network for moving illegal items that no one would ever suspect.”

Following the money trail linked to real estate developer Wicklay Corporation and others, Meg notes that the name Eric Goddard is connected to them all. A Web search indicates that his office is on Brickell Avenue in Miami. The “warrior woman” enters a metaphoric Labyrinth of Crete and encounters more dangers than Minotaur could imagine.

Meg spelled backward is Gem, something of great value or excellence. MOTHER MAY I is the Gem in Harry Hunsicker’s crown of 10 audacious novels.