Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross, #1)

by James Patterson

But Jezzie Flanagan had already walked away, at least partly to keep from saying anything else to Victor. She did feel nervous. And ill. And mostly, wired as hell. She wasn’t so much looking for familiar faces in the crowded school lobby, as the right faces. There were two of them now! Charlie Chakely and Mike Devine. Her agents. The two men she had assigned to young Michael Goldberg and also Maggie Rose Dunne, since they traveled back and forth to school together.

As the first-ever female supervisor in the Secret Service, Jezzie Flanagan holds a unique position of authority. Her character is intriguing because as hard as she’s worked to achieve this professional recognition, any mistake will make her fall that much steeper, difficult, and public. At the beginning of the story, she’s in control of her trajectory—making it all the more impossible to stop watching as she loses her way.