After suffering through a streak of painfully slow thrillers, I was beginning to wonder if modern suspense novels had collectively forgotten the suspense part. Then I picked up Mike Lawson’s The Asset - a sharp, layered political thriller filled with fixers, smear campaigns, and enough twists to restore my faith in the genre. Smart, fast-moving, and wonderfully cynical, this one actually remembers that thrillers are supposed to thrill.

