Blackout - Hardcover

A native New Yorker, RITA-winning author Annie Solomon has been dreaming up stories since she was ten. After a twelve-year career in advertising, where she rose to Vice President and Head Writer at a mid-size agency, she abandoned the air conditioners, furnaces, and heat pumps of her professional life for her first love--romance. An avid knitter and mother of a daughter attending college, she now lives in Nashville with her husband. You can visit her Web site at www.anniesolomon.net.

False memory, an interesting if overly familiar plot device, forms the basis for the latest romantic thriller by Solomon (Blind Curve), an enticing read that shamelessly plants The Bourne Identity in the fertile soil of the current War on Terror. Margo Scott, owner of a small Washington, D.C., bookstore, awakens to find she can't remember the last month of her life. Worse, that same day she's questioned in the murder of Frank Temple, the deputy director of Washington's elite Terrorism Control Force, a man she swears she's never met. Soon Margo realizes she has no evidence of the normal life she knows—no photos, no contacts in her PDA—while evidence of a life she has no recollection of piles up, including her expert combat skills and a government tail named Jack Wise. With a suspicious Jack at her side, she must find out how and why her memories were falsified, who murdered Temple and what happened during her lost month. Solomon takes her time getting to the heart of the story, but once the action kicks in the pace picks up considerably. Despite a forced romance between Margo and Jack (standard-issue bickering included), Solomon's latest is twisty and diverting, with well-written action sequences and a winning lead. (Apr.)
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