Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
35-year-old series protagonist Nadia Stafford owns and operates a wilderness guest lodge in the wilds of the vast Canadian forests northwest of Toronto, and her 53-year-old live-in boyfriend Jack helps out in this enterprise at times. (They’re a loving and committed couple, but they can’t legally marry because Jack no longer has any legal ID under his real name, and it would be very dangerous for him to try to get any.) Our story begins at the lodge, but after the first six chapters (and these are short chapters), we head out with the pair to sunny Hawaii, ostensibly for a sudden quick vacation. But it’s really a business trip; they’ve been hired to work together, which is unusual. Since they both occasionally moonlight as hired killers (although only of genuine baddies, not innocents), a typical employment contract for one of them calls for bringing about some villain’s demise. This time out, though, their main job is really the converse: to protect a good person from an untimely demise.
Over the past year, a social worker and a judge, both working in Hawaii’s family-court system, died in phony suicides that have been unmasked as concealed murders. Now a lawyer specializing in these kinds of cases has been blinded in one eye by a bomb, meant for him, that killed his teenage daughter. Gallant young lawyer Angela Kamaka has stepped up to take over his caseload –and since she has, her dog has been poisoned; she discovered a bomb attached to her car before turning the key, which would have detonated it, and her boyfriend was shot at in her backyard, and has decamped. An old acquaintance (not a friend; they didn’t part on the best of terms!) of Jack’s, one Tyrone Cypress, cares about Angela’s safety.
To his mind, ensuring it means taking out the killer behind this string of murders and murder attempts. The problem is, nobody knows who this is; the police are stymied. (They have suspects, but that isn’t the same thing as hard evidence.) So, he’s not just hiring a hit on the culprit; first, that culprit will need to be unmasked. That’s where he thinks Nadia’s talents will come in handy; and knowing her attitudes by reputation, he’s pretty sure Angela’s the sort of person our favorite lady assassin would care about and want to help.
He’s definitely not wrong on that score; and Nadia does have more investigative chops than either Ty or Jack. She’s as adept with a computer as she is with a gun; and as an ex-cop (she was kicked off the force for dishing out some vigilante justice) she has police experience. But she was a beat cop, not a detective. As she notes here, while she has solved mysteries before, she was able to because she already knew something the police didn’t, or because the solution essentially dropped into her lap. Investigative technique isn’t really something she’s trained in, and here she’s soon conscious that she’s in over her head. (But she IS smart, very good at deductive reasoning, and gifted at reading other people….)
As in the preceding novella, Double Play, Nadia is our first-person narrator in the chapters identified with her name, while Jack is viewpoint character for the third-person chapters identified with his name, and told with his perspective and vocabulary. Unlike the earlier book, though, the plotting here is impeccable; it’s a very nicely-constructed traditional mystery, without logical problems or excessive stupidity on the criminal side. (After a big reveal, I did guess another development before Nadia did, but not much before.) ‘
Also in an improvement over Double Play, Jack’s use of the f-word is toned down significantly in his chapters (and Nadia’s always been, for someone with her background, relatively temperate in her use of bad language). The worst language here actually comes from Tyrone. There’s no explicit sexual content, and violence is minimal and not overly graphic. Armstrong’s prose style is serviceable and spare, without being overly “minimalist;” there’s a strong narrative drive, and the plotting is tight, making for a quick, page-turning read. Both main characters are likeable (just because we know they occasionally dispatch some bad guys doesn’t mean we can’t like them :-) ), and I really liked the ending, though I’ll write no spoilers!
Armstrong mentions in an author’s note that Tyrone Cypress is a cross-over character, who also appears in the second novel of another of her series, the Rockton series. I haven’t read any of those books, or indeed any of her work but the two novellas in this omnibus. I would probably try one of her supernatural series before starting another of her descriptive fiction series. But before doing either, my priority would be to read the original Nadia Stafford trilogy; and I hope to do that sooner rather than later!
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: KLA Fricke Inc.; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book –but only as an omnibus edition paired with the previous novella, Double Play.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.