Instalove Purgatory

When a dangerous redhead invades his office and his base, and warns that his team is in danger, Director Jonah Grayson doesn’t know if she’s friend or foe.

Former elite Army aviator Jonah Grayson was forced to give up flying, but now serves as director of the covert black ops team, Team 52. He takes care of the brass in Washington D.C. to ensure his team can do their job: keeping the world safe from dangerous, ancient artifacts. But when he’s confronted by a tough, skilled, mysterious redhead with a warning that his team is being targeted, he’ll do whatever it takes in order to find out who she is and what she wants.

Evan Fletcher’s life has imploded. She’s on the run, been labeled a rogue and traitor, and she knows a very bad, powerful man has Team 52 in his sights. He’s after a deadly artifact and wants the team out of his way...but Evan plans to stop him. She’ll use all of her particular skill set to bring him down, clear her name, and protect Team 52…and that includes the team’s handsome, oh-so-tempting director.

Surrounded by danger at every turn, Evan and Jonah are drawn to each in ways they can’t explain. To keep Team 52 safe, stop the enemy, and find justice for Evan, they will put everything on the line. But when you’re under fire, trust is hard, and falling in love is even harder.

The end of Team 52 closes appropriately with Jonah Grayson’s story – the stalwart and stoic director of Team 52 falls the hardest and the latest in Anna Hackett’s “Mission: Her Justice”, rather predictably however, for a mysterious redhead who seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Like the rest of the series, this is a book that stands somewhere in the middle of part-urban-fantasy and full-on adventure storytelling, premised on the idea that ancient, advanced civilisations left trails of their knowledge now deemed too dangerous for the world to possess. Enter Team 52, tasked to retrieve these artefacts before the baddies try to stake their claim on it. Jonah and Evan’s story is no different, an instant lust and love type of relationship (that honestly needed at least half a book to develop, not 10 pages) that pretty much falls by the wayside of Evan’s revenge plan.

Admittedly I’m still stroking my chin in bewilderment after I’ve finished reading: the crazy-rushed way that both went from distrust to full-on commitment, the lack of detailed checks I’d expected Jonah to do on Evan, the speed at which he seemed to believe Evan’s innocence, the quick sex and the even quicker falling in love…all factored into my inability to cut the scepticism away, especially with plots such as these.

But if you’re in for the non-stop action, some Egyptology, the saved-by-alien-technology-as-the-way-out kind of plot with a happily resolved end for everyone–and I mean for everyone involved–then this is the book to go for. I just wish Hackett would write a fully-expanded story that would have been brilliant given the depth of her imagination, but her novellas of late have tended to disappoint more than thrill.