Advanced Reader Copy

Attorney and political heavyweight Tobias Faraday is the Ice King, a man alone in the eye of a deadly storm. And in the wake of his sister’s torture, he’s out for blood.
The key to Tobias’s revenge is the disavowed British spy he’s kept imprisoned for weeks. Chandler McCallister can get him behind enemy lines in Russia, but the clever double-agent has a demand of her own before she puts her life on the line in the name of redemption.
Posing as Chandler’s boyfriend at an aristocratic wedding in the English countryside won’t kill Tobias. Not in theory.
As the threat of Moscow looms larger and the enemy reveals himself to be crueler than any human can imagine, Tobias reluctantly partners with his prisoner to derail the immediate threat—to their families, to Faraday Industries, and to their lives. What he finds in the process is a feverish, relentless need already melting the ice from his veins.

As far as Tobias Faraday is concerned, his mission of vengeance can only go one way – with the disavowed British spy Chandler Mcallister – whom he holds responsible for the brutal torture of his sister in Blamed – leading the way into the Russian trafficking ring and back into her nightmare. Chandler only asks one thing in return: that she gets to attend her twin’s wedding and because Tobias refuses to leave her side, he finds himself going along as her pretend significant other.

There is a ton of suspense, a lot of intrigue and some steamy scenes, but I did feel like I needed to play a little catch up the moment we plunged into the action. I definitely liked seeing Beth and Vick again but the standout gem here is the coolly enigmatic Tobias, whose whose icy but arrogant exterior and immense self-control (and self-imposed celibacy) have for many years, helped placed the world at his feet. Why exactly he found himself so affected by Chandler is still a little beyond me despite Harris’s admirable effort in trying to unravel this hard and single-minded woman hell-bent on protecting the only family that she knows.

Blood Money is certainly a series I’d keep watching out for; through Beth and now Tobias, we see the cracks appearing in the burden the Faraday children have had to carry as they grew up. It is Tobias’s regret that they’ve all taken a path they’d chosen all those years ago and it has been more than hinted that each of the Faraday children will have to somehow claw their way to their own HEA. Right now, I’m trusting Edie Harris to bring that to fruition with, hopefully, a cast of characters as memorable as Tobias, Beth and Vick.