"this super author hooks the reader with plenty of action"

In high school, Evan Delaney and her class go on a field trip to the Naval Base in China Lake to do some sketches of drawings on a canyon. Evan and three other girls slip away and go where a project is being blown up, which they witness. Various Federal agents interview the four high school females, but eventually they return to school. Evan goes on with her life assuming the incident was nothing.

Evan accompanied by her lover Jesse attends her high school class' fifteenth year anniversary gala. Those who died are commemorated, but no one notices that the people who died are way higher than average in this grouping. Someone killed one of the high school witnesses before the reunion and a second one just after the event. Evan soon learns that a black ops experiment being blown up was what they actually observed fifteen years ago. Now anyone remotely associated with Project South Star is being killed; Evan will not sit idly by waiting her turn.

This is the fourth Meg Gardiner thriller I read and as with the others this super author hooks the reader with plenty of action and a heroine who is a woman in peril, but takes care of herself although that drives the men in her life crazy especially Jesse who loves her. The story line is fast-paced and a bit over the Sierras, but fun to read as Jessie will do anything to keep his beloved Evan safe even when she, in his mind, foolishly risks her life to stop the Captain America replica.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted September 11, 2008

Summary

Evan Delaney knew China Lake was a tough place to grow up. But she never knew how tough until now—she returns to the desert military base for her high school reunion, and learns that a number of her classmates have died young. Then, on the first night of the reunion, another one dies— this one savagely butchered. And she's just the first. Someone has an axe to grind—and Evan's graduating class has something to fear.