Death Echo

By Elizabeth Lowell

        Emma Cross is an employee of St. Kilda Consulting, a job that should be a breeze for the former CIA Operative.  In her position with St. Kilda, she is responsible for tracking yacht thefts.  She had hoped she could leave the violence she lived with for so long behind her.  Yet it was not in the cards.  This is the fifth St. Kilda book that Elizabeth Lowell has written and the suspense is always at the forefront of the story.  Emma is assigned the task of finding out everything she can about the yacht “Blackbird.”  It is the twin of another yacht that hadpreviously gone missing.  The Federal Government of The United States is involved in this highly charged novel of intrigue, terrorist threats and a looming deadline.  Emma has just one short week to break this case or an American city may be utterly destroyed with untold lives lost.

I read this book over the course of a weekend.  I’m a fast reader, so that is actually a long time for me.  It took me that long because there was so much to absorb; fast paced thriller scenes, action packed suspense scenes, a modicum of emotional drama and the icing on the cake being the intelligent, well crafted political intrigue.  There is a lot of detail to process in this story. Somewhat excessive exposition occurs fairly often in the course of the book.  I found my brain a bit tired if I read too much at once.  There are many characters, both primary and peripheral, and keeping them straight was a task as well.  Yet there was enough focus on Emma and on her mutual attraction with former Special Ops turned transit Captain Mac Durand to keep me interested on an emotional level as well.

While I’d highly recommend the book as a summer read for fans of Lowell’s previous St. Kilda Consulting books, I do think it’s a bit of a hard to digest read for novices to her work.  I had to put a lot of effort into it, wasn’t sure just how much I was enjoying it, but in the end, I’m glad I stuck with it and must say that even if you haven’t read Elizabeth Lowell’s writing before, it’s definitely worth a go if you love suspense thrillers and are eager to learn more about the enigmatic world of yachts, spies and terrorists in these trying times we live in.