Dark site : a Sam Dryden novel / Patrick Lee.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the author of Runner , Sam Dryden comes under attack from unknown forces as an unremembered episode from his past threatens more than just his life.

On an otherwise normal morning, former Special Forces operative Sam Dryden is the target of an unsuccessful attempted abduction. Using his attacker's cellphone, he learns that another person, a woman named Danica Ellis, is also being targeted. Dryden arrives just in time to save Danica from the assault team sent after her. But neither of them recognize the other, or have any idea why they are being targeted. The only clue is a heavily redacted, official-looking document given to Danica by her stepfather before he was killed.

Dryden immediately recognizes it as a "scrub file." A scrub file is a record of what a subject knew before their memories were chemically destroyed. The redacted document refers to witnesses to a secret military site in Ashland, Iowa in 1989. Both Dryden and Danica Ellis lived in Ashland in 1989, when they were both twelve years old, though neither of them has any memory of the other.

Switching back and forth between the present day, when Dryden and Danica try to elude the forces that are after them, and the past in Ashland, Iowa, when both were twelve, making a discovery that forever changed their lives, this latest Sam Dryden novel proves yet again that Patrick Lee is one of the most original, compelling thriller writers today.

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Publishers Weekly Review

Bestseller Lee's riveting third Sam Dryden novel (after 2015's Signal) reads like an amped-up version of TV's Stranger Things. In the small town of Brookings, Ore., Danica Ellis is attacked in a store by a man and a woman who are intent on abducting her. She escapes. Dryden, a former Special Forces operative, lives in Malibu, Calif., where he fixes up old houses. A man with a pistol attacks him, but he also escapes. Using his assailant's cell phone, Sam learns that there's another intended victim, a woman, who is in danger. Sam links up with the woman, Danica, and together they try to figure out who wants them and why. Flash back to 1989: Sam is 12 years old and recently moved to Ashland, Iowa. Sam meets another 12-year-old, Dani Ellis, and thus begins the fascinating story of the mystery of Ashland, which is in reality a secret military site. In an intriguing twist, Sam and Danica, as adults, have no memory of having known each other in 1989. This is a compulsive, nail-biting, stay-up-all-night thriller. Agent: Janet Reid, New Leaf Literary. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

For readers of Lee's first two Sam Dryden novels (Runner, 2014, and Signal, 2015) who have been itching for backstory about the preternaturally capable former black-ops soldier, the wait is over. In this third installment of the edge-of-your-chair series, Dryden has no choice but to confront his past, which, it turns out, he knows almost as little about as we do. It begins when Sam dispatches an attacker and learns that his would-be killer has a partner with his own target: a woman unknown to Sam named Danica Ellis. Naturally, Sam hotfoots it to Danica's home and saves her from being killed. But what's going on? In the theme that unifies this series, Sam is again on the run, except this time he and Danica have no idea who's chasing them or why. Piecing together leads slowly, they learn that they knew each other, as teenagers in tiny Ashland, Iowa, where their fathers were doing some sort of secret work. Lee jumps between the present and 1989, when a chemical-warfare experiment went badly wrong and required Sam's and Danica's brains to be wiped of the incident. As always, Lee builds tension superbly, but here he adds the extra element of parceling out information from past and present in ever-so-small increments, creating exquisite dramatic irony as we know just enough more than the protagonists do to twist our stomachs into ever-tightening knots. Breakneck pacing, of course, but somehow Lee manages to build character and create an audacious premise without ever taking his foot off the throttle.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist