The Rhythm Section
After the death of her parents and brother in a plane crash over the Atlantic, Stephanie Patrick descends into a life of prostitution and dissolution. She begins to pull herself together when a journalist tells her that the crash was no accident, that it was a terrorist bombing covered up by the world's intelligence agencies. Then the journalist is murdered, and Stephanie is recruited into a shadowy law enforcement agency to become a killer. If the plot of this first novel sounds a little like the movie and TV seriesLa Femme Nikita, that's understandable. But Burnell manages to inject some new life into the tired premise. Stephanie is a tough, resilient heroine, seriously challenged by the multiple personalities she's forced to don, while focused laserlike on avenging her family's death. Even the terrorists emerge as more than cardboard cutouts, especially in the climactic scene in which Stephanie confronts her antagonist. What begins as a B-movie knockoff ends as an entertaining meditation on the futility of terrorist brinkmanship.George Needham--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.