DEADLY DANCE - Dee Davis
A-Tac Series, Book 5
Forever
ISBN: 978-0-446-58294-0
April 2012
Romantic Suspense

Sunderland College, New York - Present Day

A Sunderland College coed is missing.  When a student of Professor Hannah Marshall receives video footage of a tortured young woman on her computer, Hannah knows it's time to trust her new partner and put the A-Tac team to work. The video shows a young woman bound and tortured, her body a mass of carefully placed cuts that will cause her to bleed out and die unless the A-Tac operatives can reach her in time.

Deep under the buildings of the Sunderland campus lies the headquarters and home of the covert black-ops CIA unit, A-Tac.  Hannah and all of the other operatives are professors at the college; it's the perfect cover for their operation.  Luckily, Hannah's new partner, Harrison Blake, is a computer whiz.  As the head of the Sunderland IT department, Harrison is the one person who can analyze the video and find the answers they need.  But Harrison is disturbed when he sees the footage. The senseless torture of the woman who is surely dead by now hits too close to home.  Suddenly, Harrison's past is rushing up to meet him.  The last time he saw something like this was when he was tracking the Cyber Killer in Texas and trying to save his sister's life.  Has the Cyber Killer returned?

Hannah doesn't trust easily.  She lost her last partner on a previous mission that went bad.  Now, she has to put her life in Harrison's hands, and he's disturbed enough by the nightmares that plague him to this day.  The video is simply a replay of his agony and his inability to save his sister from the Cyber Killer.  Can he live through that again?  And it isn't only Harrison who is disturbed.  As the scenes play out, Hannah can't help but remember her own past at the hands of a deranged monster.

Scene by scene and step by step, Hannah and Harrison rush to stop this killer.  As another young woman disappears, they're locked in a DEADLY DANCE as the suspense escalates.

Even though the story is fast paced, I cannot identify with the characters or the gruesome details of the torture and past experiences of both Harrison and Hannah.  There is a lot of action but we really don't know their feelings or anything about their lives outside of their pasts.  That aside, DEADLY DANCE is a dynamic suspense that fans will surely enjoy.

Diana Risso