Genre: Thriller
Description:
“Former assassin and SHEN operative Leine Basso is fresh off an
assignment rescuing an American teenager from a terrorist group in Libya when
she thwarts the murder of a street kid in Tripoli. Leine agrees to help the
girl find her family, but must first visit a refugee camp to uncover the reason
behind a rash of mysterious abductions.
Leaving the camp, Leine comes under a surprise attack--but only a
handful of people knew her true mission. Who has betrayed her? The more she
discovers about the abductions, the more of a target she becomes, forcing her
to revisit a dark and violent past she thought she'd left behind. But it's
easy--too easy to fall back into her old ways.
And that could get her killed.
Will Leine be able to survive a dark return?”
Author:
“DV Berkom is the USA Today bestselling author of two action-packed
thriller series featuring strong female leads: Kate Jones and Leine Basso. Her
love of creating resilient, kick-ass women characters stems from a lifelong
addiction to reading spy novels, mysteries, and thrillers, and longing to find
the female equivalent within those pages.
After years of moving around the country and skipping off to locations
that could have been movie sets, she wrote her first novel and was hooked. She
now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Mark, and several
imaginary characters who like to tell her what to do.”
Appraisal:
Dark
Return is the seventh book in the Leine Basso Thriller Series and I’ve read all
of them. The aspect that defines Leine’s character for me is the balancing act that
she does between good and evil. Her past is shady by any reasonable definition
and it sometimes comes back to haunt her in different ways. Her present is
entirely on the side of good, although she definitely needs to call on some
evil skills in her quest to do good, even now. But that balance, that pull from
both the good and bad sides, and the memories of the past when that balance wasn’t
there is what drives these stories.
Those same qualities help drive and color the narrative of Dark Return, but as the story and this
particular case wind down, Leine is out of balance, feeling too much pull from
her dark side. Even though the story of the current case is concluded, so it
wouldn’t be fair to describe the situation as a cliffhanger, we do leave Leine
in a scary place. It’s disconcerting, but we’ll have to wait for the next
installment of the series to see what that means for Leine.
FYI:
Some adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 70-75,000 words
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