TRUE SHOT – Joyce Lamb
The True Trilogy , Book 3
Berkley Sensation
ISBN-13: 978-0-425-24492-0
December 2011
Romantic Paranormal Suspense

Shenandoah Mountains , West Virginia  to Lake Avalon , Florida – Present Day

Samantha Trudeau is running for her life.  Her boss, Flinn, is determined to see that she does not live to see tomorrow.  In charge of covert operations for the FBI, Flinn is out of control.  He has had two of Sam's fellow agents killed, and at least one of them was impregnated against her will, all because of Flinn's experiments to create a new breed of super-spies.  Sam doesn't know why Zoe is dead, but she knows that she's next on Flinn's list, if he can catch up with her.  She runs to the only safe place she can think of, the Trudeau family cabin in the Shenandoah Mountains .

Journalist Mac Hunter arrives at the Trudeau cabin ready for a relaxing vacation.  Alex Trudeau and her sister Charlie forced him to take time away to rest.  Now he's here at the cabin, but so is someone else, and she's holding a gun!  Not long after Sam and Mac meet, they find themselves running from Flinn's thugs who are chasing them with the intent to kill.  Though she calls herself Claire, Mac knows this woman must be Alex and Charlie's runaway sister Samantha who disappeared over ten years ago.  He watches her dispense with the thugs quickly and with precision and he knows it is not her first time handling a gun.  But he doesn't have time to puzzle it out as they steal a car and hit the road running.

Samantha left home at only 17 after she killed a man and Flinn rescued her.  He forced her to become a pawn as part of a covert operation of empathic spies.  Sam simply touches someone and she is sent into a psychotic trance where she feels and sees awful events that happened in that person's life.  Both her sisters, Alex and Charlie, are empathic as well, but it's Sam who is being used to do the FBI's dirty work.  Flinn has kept her on a tight rope all these years by lying to her over and over again.  And now he's gone too far.  Sam just wants to get away from his control and out from under the influence of the drugs he controls her with.  But Flinn is tracking her and watching, waiting for the chance to take her down once and for all.

TRUE SHOT is a fast paced thriller in the continuing saga of Samantha Trudeau and her sisters.  Sam's empathy is the ability to “read” people simply by touching them, all courtesy of the psychotic drugs Flinn and his scientist have developed to enhance her natural psychic abilities.  Sam has entered the mind of the worst killers who take lives without remorse and just for the sport of it; then she takes them down.  As she and Mac Hunter run for their lives, and the drugs begin to leave her body, Samantha wonders who she really is, and if she will survive.

TRUE SHOT is third in the True trilogy, preceded by TRUE COLORS (January 2011) and TRUE VISION (June 2010).  The characters, pacing and writing of TRUE SHOT is top notch, and the suspense is real and frightening.  I cannot identify with the characters; I prefer less violent thrillers.  But my feelings aside, I know there are many fans of this series, and they will surely enjoy this novel.

Diana Risso