Vendetta
by Iris Johansen brings back characters introduced in the
Eve Duncan books. Although it’s billed as an “Eve
Duncan”, she is only mentioned briefly. But, this does
not take anything away from the plot and the main characters,
Rachel Venable and Jude Brandon. The story centers on these
two and their attempts to bring down Max Huber, the head of
Red Star, a terrorist organization with immense power.
The story begins with the shooting of a top CIA official,
Carl Venable. His dying breath to the operative, Jude Brandon,
to save his daughter, Dr. Rachel Venable, and give her the
choice of eliminating Huber to prevent him from wreaking further
havoc on a global scale. Huber wants revenge on Rachel, believing
that she killed his father by poisoning him. Enlisting the
help of her good friend, CIA operative Catherine Ling and
her on again, off again boyfriend, Richard Cameron, they work
together to bring Huber down.
Johansen noted, “Every other chapter
has a choice come into play. It is all about making choices.
Rachel had to decide if she would go after the bad guys. Brandon
whether he would involve himself emotionally with Rachel.
Catherine made the choice not to hide from her desire for
Cameron, as well as knowing she had to give Rachel space and
control over her own destiny. The bad guy Huber is pure evil
without redeeming qualities, and his choice was to inflict
as much collateral damage as possible. Even though I have
a choice as a writer, I just wanted to kill Huber for doing
terrible things to the people I love in my books.”
Both Rachel and Catherine had similar experiences
of having to overcome rape. At the age of fifteen, Rachel
was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan, watched them kill
her mother and brother, and was brutally raped as well as
tortured. What Johansen does wonderfully is to show how Rachel
is determined to overcome her past experiences. One of the
reasons she becomes a medical doctor is to heal people. Both
Catherine and Rachel are intelligent, tough, strong, independent,
and stubborn.
The book quote has Rachel determined not to
be seen as a cripple. “I wrote that because I consider
it the bravest thing she ever said. She went through a terrible
event, but she fought and conquered it. Catherine also had
a tough life, growing up on the Hong Kong waterfronts. She
learned from it to become stronger. These two women are more
similar than different. They had rough teenage years that
they had to overcome. I think they are more sisters than friends
and will always go to bat for each other. I think Catherine
is more like the older sister because she has a son, which
makes a big difference.”
Johansen
writes female characters that are something other than constant
damsels in distress. They find a way to survive and have come
out even stronger. This story shows how a character’s
past and the decisions made influence the present and future,
sometimes to the point of getting revenge by pursuing a vendetta.
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