Andree Duval, Relief Librarian for the County of Lennox & Addington Libraries, recently read Ultimatum by Karen Robards which she describes as a breakneck speed thriller that kept her turning pages well into the night.

Bianca St. Ives is great at her job. Since childhood her father trained her as a master thief. She is smart, beautiful, speaks several languages and is a martial arts specialist. She can usually talk or fight her way out of any sticky situation due essentially to her father’s invaluable ‘rules of survival’. Under her nom de guerre, The Guardian, she and her father run a multinational firm that relieves con men and thieves of their ill gotten gains.

The firm takes on retrieval contracts. Using a specialized crew of workers and contacts throughout the world. They have many enemies among law enforcement and the underworld elite. Their latest contract is a heist at a palace in Bahrain which goes violently wrong. Bianca and Doc (the crew’s computer expert) escape but her father and his accomplices die in a fiery explosion.

Pick up a copy of Ultimatum for the enjoyable, high octane story packed between the covers.

“Live your life in compartments” is one of her father’s rules so Bianca previously built a separate identity as the owner of a security firm in Savannah, Georgia. Narrowly escaping the Bahrain and international police, she and Doc head back to the States to hide out. They monitor her father’s email account as a safety precaution. When a potential contract is sent via the email by someone who believes her father is still alive, Bianca and Doc think it is a trap. However, she is forced into accepting the job when the proposed client threatens to publish a video of her father, his new wife and their daughter.

Bianca and Doc must recover a stolen “prototype weapons defense system”. They fly out to San Francisco to carry out the theft and again run into serious trouble. Bianca decides to cancel the job but has to reconsider when the client sends her evidence that her step mother and seven year-old half sister have been kidnapped. Although she has never met them and much of her own early childhood is a mystery to Bianca, she feels she must protect them.

Bianca and Doc face extreme danger to fulfill the contract. She will need all her strength to come to terms with the incredible story of her past. Bianca will also need all of her cunning if she and Doc are to survive. Pick up a copy of Ultimatum for the enjoyable, high octane story packed between the covers.

You can reserve it today at your branch of the County of L&A Libraries or online at www.CountyLibrary.ca.