The Freedom Broker

★★★1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Thea Paris is such a cool character – she's like a combination of Charlie Fox and Vanessa Michael Munroe – but with a very different load of emotional baggage. When she was a child, her brother was sleeping in her room to help her make it through a hard night when he was kidnapped. She's spent the following decades convinced that the only reason he was kidnapped is that the abductors thought he was Thea. Yes, he eventually made it back safely, but he was (obviously) never the same, and Thea used that to fuel her mission in life. Her father is the tycooniest of American Oil Tycoons, and she could've easily rested on his laurels, or followed in the family business.

But no, Thea is in private security, with an emphasis on K&R (Kidnapping and Ransom). She's the one negotiating with kidnappers/their representatives to get a ransom paid and the victim returned to his home/family/nation/company. When that doesn't work, Thea will lead the extraction team doing what they can to bring te victim home. She's one of the best around. She is not perfect, and we see that right off, but she gets the job done well.

Which is good, because on the verge of one of the biggest deals of his life, Thea's father, Christos, is kidnapped. It's up to her, some allies and friends to bring him home. There are several candidates for the kidnapper's identity – there's the Chinese oil corporations competing with her father, there are representatives of the African nation that kidnapped her brother all those years ago, there's an arms dealer that has rumors flying, too. In the midst of this hunt, secrets will be revealed (many Thea will regret learning), and virtually everyone in her life will end up divulging something dark and hidden.

One more thing about Thea – she's diabetic. Which is an interesting character trait – I can't think of another action hero with something like that: a real physical condition that requires maintenance, but is manageable and will not ordinarily cause anything more than inconvenience. Sure, it does give us what I'm calling Chekhov's glucose monitor (not a spoiler, that's what I put in my notes when it was first mentioned).

I liked the other characters, too – but it's hard to talk about most of them without getting too heavily into the plot. So let's just say there are a few people I'm really looking forward to seeing again, and a few that I enjoyed enough this time out, but am very glad they're in no position to show up again. Just about everyone has a believable motivation – no matter what side of the law and/or morality they fall on – which is just great.

Howe's prose is tight and the pacing is great. There's a few times that Thea has the same thought over and over – which is probably realistic, but it seems repetitive (and possibly not trusting the reader enough) to read her conclude “X may have done Y” in a chapter, and then “Y may have been done by X” in the next. But it's nothing to get too worked up over, I didn't think. Howe does seem to have a “everything including the kitchen sink” approach to story telling – the number of things that go wrong during Thea's search for her father, and the number of opponents and obstacles in her way is seemingly endless. I love it, every time you think she's on a roll and things are going to start going her way, a problem that the reader should've seen coming (but almost never does) shows up to derail things again. Sure, eventually, that comes to an end – the book doesn't go on forever – but not until Howe's good and ready for it to end. She's probably getting a new kitchen constructed to hurl at Thea in the next book.

There's a great mix of action and intrigue, putting clues together and smacking heads, emotional growth and uncovering the past. Like it's protagonist, The Freedom Broker isn't perfect, but it gets the job done well. Sign me up for the upcoming sequel, too.

Meh. It wasn't half-bad.