Tina's Reading Books

This was like the book equivalent of sitting in a Saturday matinee, eating popcorn and having just an afternoon of mindless fun.

I love the tv show Leverage and this book is exactly in that vein. It is book that relies on the work of a long con to get the bad guys.

The main characters are Nick Fox and Kate O'Hare.

Nick is a handsome, charming thief who is always thinking ten moves ahead. He has perfected the art of the grift. Kate is the ex-military FBI agent who has been chasing Nick for years. He knows this and taunts her each time he slips away from her, not in a mean way but in a sexy "til the next time you almost catch me" way.

Kate finally catches him but in typical Nick fashion he oozes his way out of it. He convinces the FBI to use him as a way to catch even bigger, more elusive criminals. After all as the old adage says: it takes a thief to catch a thief. Kate is along as his beleaguered watcher and reluctant co-conspirator.

Their very first case is to catch a guy who embezzled half a billion dollars and escaped to parts unknown. They must find him, get him back on US soil and recover the money.

Like every self respecting con artist book, movie or tv show, they have to assemble a team of people with a different skill sets to help them pull this off. It was fun watching Nick pull in the crew and get to meet them.

The book is very light hearted and full of funny lines and great personalities. Kate and Nick couldn't be more different and I liked each one of them for different reasons. Kate is the no-nonsense person who loves being FBI. She's good with guns and hand-to-hand combat. I just adore the fact that petite Kate is basically the muscle. Whereas Nick is the twisty brains behind everything. He likes his luxury and creature comforts and even in a cave in the middle of an Island he manages to set a great table.

The supporting characters are great fun, but since this is a first book and we only meet them halfway through at first most of them tend to be background. I imagine as the series goes on we'll get to know them better. But of the crew I enjoyed Boyd, the method actor who really takes his part seriously and Kate's dad, Jake. Jake is also ex-military with a colorful, dangerous career that we only hear in bits an pieces.

This is all globe-trotting adventure with lots of banter and guns and fun character moments. Very little romance although Nick and Kate are very attracted to each other. Nick is down for it, obviously, he's a guy. But Kate still only sees him as her arch-nemesis, a criminal she is forced to work with. But I would guess at some point they'll get together. The signs are too glaring for it not to happen.

Edited to add: I listened to this in audio and the narrator, Scott Brick,  was great. He has a nice rich voice and is good with accents. And he didn't do that really annoying thing that some male narrators do by doing a high falsetto when doing the female character voices.