Readers who are able to firmly willingly suspend their disbelief are in
for a rocket of a read in Karen Robards' THE MOSCOW DECEPTION. This is the second book
in The Guardian series. I
didn't remember much of the first book (published fully one year ago),
The Ultimatum, so I believe this could function as a standalone title.
Bianca St. Ives is known as The Guardian. She ran a multi-national
protection firm with her father where they swindled con men out of
their ill-gotten gains. But her father seems to have died during a $200
million heist from the government, and now Bianca is just trying to stay
anonymous and out of the government's hands. Turns out she's the last
of a batch of genetically engineered super soldiers, and the
government wants her dead in order to sweep the whole project under
the rug. And that man she thought was her dad? Turns out he was
dispatched by the government to kill her as a child. Instead, he hid her
and raised her to have incredible fighting and spycraft skills.
We're told Bianca has these mad spy skills, but then we watch her
make situational mistake after mistake, which raises the stakes for the
dangerous situations that she's in. Fortunately, she's stocked with all
kinds of over-the-top gadgets, as if she's got Bond's Q in her back
pocket: garter belts that contain rappelling equipment that can get her
down nineteen-story buildings and bullet-proof evening gowns. In
addition, there's an MI6 agent, now an independent contractor, who's
got the hots for her and manages to rescue her a few times.
There's a lot of crazy action, and a little romance is thrown in as well.
The pace is rollicking, and the danger level remains high throughout
Bianca's escapades. If you like your books with high tension and lots of
creative adventure, Robards' THE
MOSCOW DECEPTION fits the bill.
Bianca St. Ives was recently put through the wringer, but
she came out the same way she always does—the way her father
trained her to—hungry for a fight. Still navigating the
fallout from a shocking revelation that’s left a network of
assassins’ crosshairs trained on her, Bianca’s ready to take
fate into her own hands. It’s kill or be killed, and she’s
got her finger flush against the trigger.
But as Bianca races to outmaneuver her tireless pursuers,
her father loops her in on a job that might just do the
trick: recover King Priam’s Treasure, a collection of
heavily guarded, priceless artifacts stolen by the Russians
during World War II, and return it to Germany. Impossible?
Maybe for some, but a high-risk heist is all in a day’s work
for Bianca St. Ives, especially when there’s intel on the
line—intel that could finally bring down the shadowy forces
seeking to bury Bianca for good. Faced with threats that
circle closer with every move she makes, she knows the
stakes have never been higher, but when you’re already
living on borrowed time, you have to hustle if you want to
live to see tomorrow.