Escape Artist/Zig & Nola Books in Order

The Escape Artist, or Zig and Nola, novels revolve around two very different people who keep getting pulled into the same storms. Jim "Zig" Zigarowski is a civilian mortician who once worked at Dover Air Force Base, the place where America quietly receives its war dead. Nola Brown is the US Army’s artist in residence, a combat trained painter whose job is to rush toward danger and record what others miss.

When the series opens in The Escape Artist, Zig is called back to Dover to work on the body of a female soldier killed in what looks like a routine military plane crash. The dead woman is listed as Nola Brown, a troubled Girl Scout from his daughter’s past who once saved his child’s life. On the autopsy table, though, Zig finds details that do not match his memories. If the body is not Nola, then someone has staged her death, and Zig is the only one who seems to care why.

As he digs deeper, he discovers that Nola is very much alive and on the run. She has seen something on her last mission that powerful people want buried. Their uneasy partnership forces them through secret programs, shadowy magicians and a conspiracy that stretches back to Harry Houdini and old ideas about escape.

In The Lightning Rod, Zig is again drawn into trouble when a simple car valet scam at a funeral spirals into two murders and a dead Air Force officer with connections to a hidden Cold War era bunker nicknamed Grandma’s Pantry. Nola reappears, as dangerous to friend and foe as ever, and the pair uncover a plot that reaches into highly classified technology and a ruthless group willing to sacrifice almost anything to keep control.

The third novel, The Viper, brings the story even closer to home. A dying man hides something priceless inside the suit he plans to be buried in, only to be murdered before his secret can go to the grave. The investigation is led by Roddy LaPointe, Nola’s twin brother, and quickly links back to the unsolved killing of their mother when they were children. Zig, Roddy and Nola are forced to confront old wounds, a relentless killer and the question of who was really pulling strings decades ago.

These books are fast and twisty, but they are also strangely intimate. Meltzer spends as much time on Zig’s grief over his daughter, Nola’s fractured childhood and Roddy’s attempts to do better than the men who raised him as he does on explosions and gadgets. Expect conspiracies, hidden facilities and clever puzzles, but also a found family of damaged people trying, in their own ways, to do the right thing.