In "The Lion's Game" (2000) and "The Lion" (2010), Nelson DeMille's character NYPD Detective John Corey battles and defeats Asad Khalil, a brilliant Libyan terrorist who infiltrates the U.S. to extract revenge for the deaths of family members killed in a U.S. air raid on Tripoli.

The Panther, by Nelson DeMille. Grand Central Publishing, 2012, 629 pp., $27.99 (hardcover) Performance Anomalies, by Victor Robert Lee. Perimeter Six, 2012, 278 pp., $24.99 (hardcover)

Now it's three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Corey, assigned to a federal antiterrorist task force, is dispatched with his FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, to Yemen to hunt for another big cat. This one, Bulus ibn al-Darwish, al Numair — aka The Panther — is the bloodthirsty jihadist who played a key role in the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in October 2000.