This book has been out for awhile but I just got to read it. Wow, what a great book - with some minor quibbles.
Tamara Steele has had an impossibly hard life that started when she was 15 and her family was killed by madmen. She was used by horrible men and after they were done she has used her looks and body to climb out of the despair she was in and is a clever assassin. When she helped break up a black-market organ donor ring she ended up adopting Rachel, a three year old. During her time as an assassin, she killed Kurt Novak, a psycho path whose father is even worse. For the last five years Papa Novak has thought that the woman who killed his son was dead, but now he has found out she's alive...and he wants her so he can torture and kill her.
Val Janos is an operative for a covert company. He has been hired by yet another nutjob, Georg Luksch (Papa Novak's former #2 man and now his rival), to find and bring Tamara to him - Georg is convinced they belong together. As Val observes Tam and her daughter Rachel, he is only doing his job, but the more pressure that is put on him to abduct the kid and use it to bend Tam to their will, the more he feels it is wrong.
Before he can act either way, his mentor/oldest friend Imre is taken ill. He rushes to Budapest - Imre is Val's only weakness. When Val's bosses at PSS give him up to Novak, Imre is kidnapped and Val is forced to do their bidding if he wants Imre to remain alive. Part of that bidding is to bring Tamara to Novak instead of to Georg...this all sounds confusing but it really is not. To get Tamara to cooperate, he must seduce her, but he's done that many times before. He, too, was used as a 12 year old for horrible things before he got smarter and before Imre came into his life.
This is a story of two completely damaged souls that somehow made it through to end up in the same place. I really, really liked both characters and was rooting for them the whole book. McKenna is really an excellent writer, but as I mentioned before I have one quibble.
Rachel, the child, has been through a lot. However, it seemed that in every scene, in every mention, the child is said to be screaming her head off. I have a three year old granddaughter and I think that if she behaved as badly as this kid does, I'd have to give her Benadryl 24/7/365 just to cope. I know it was for the plot, but come on. No kid can maintain that much angst all the time.
Other than the kid stuff, the book was really good and I highly recommend it. Lots of sex but in a good way and not in a squishy way.
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