FOAMERS by Jon Berson - FIRST EDITION BOOK

Foamer. 1. Someone who foams at the mouth. 2. A train fanatic (Amtrak slang). Larry McBryde, newly divorced father of a young daughter, is tired of his bureaucratic job at Philadelphia's public transportation authority. Even trains, his one true obsession, are gradually losing their power to excite him. But when fellow foamer Georgia Huxley pays five thousand dollars for a disturbing black market tape of train accidents - the crashes, the explosions, the screams, the ambulance sirens - McBryde finds his mission. Whoever made the tapes must also have masterminded many of the high-profile train accidents recently in the news, for how else could the tape maker have been so conveniently at the scene? And that somebody must be a foamer because only a foamer would conceive of a potential market for such a tape - a foamer like McBryde, who knows every train and track and schedule and bit of terrain. Meanwhile, in Pierre, South Dakota, young FBI agent Jennifer Sczczymanski is eager to prove herself as the office's first female investigator, but she's not willing to put up with sexual harassment from her unsympathetic boss. So it's good-bye Pierre and back to D.C., where Szczymanski is thrilled to be offered a "high priority" case involving a suspicious series of train accidents. But who can she trust? Not her FBI colleagues, who may sabotage her or her work, and certainly not foamer Larry McBryde, whom she encounters early and repeatedly as she begins to see a pattern in the "accidents." Nor can McBryde trust Szczymanski, although he's increasingly drawn to her. It's troubling that her name pops up on the passenger list of just about every train that eventually crashes. Independently, McBryde and Szczymanski board the Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago. As the train pulls out of New York, only the killer know for sure that this is a train heading for disaster.