by Zoë Sharp

Not trusting your instincts is a fatal weakness for a bodyguard. 

Charlotte “Charlie” Fox, scandal-shadowed and Special Services-trained, nearly pays the ultimate price when she’s assigned to protect a mega-million lottery winner and her four-year-old daughter from a stalking ex-husband.

The ex-husband turns out to be the least of Charlie’s worries when her client, Simone Kerse, decides to fly to Boston to meet with the private investigators she hired to trace her long-lost father, Greg Lukas. Simone is willful, naive and resistant to Charlie’s requests.

Warning bells sound for Charlie when she learns one of the investigators Simone hired, Barry O’Halloran, has been killed in an apparent car accident. His brief case and notes have been swept away in the river he crashed into. His partner, Frances Neagley, thinks it unlikely that Barry would have lost control of his car. She believes she’s being tailed and is concerned enough that she’s hired her own bodyguard.

With each person who walks into Simone’s life, Charlie has to ask what his or her agenda is. Do they have a relationship with Simone and her daughter Ella — or are they seeking to relieve her of her $25 million lottery win? And why is Simone so intent on tracing the father she claims she cannot remember?  Are her unwillingness to be skeptical about the new people she’s meeting or to use basic safety precautions signs that she has an angle of her own?

This book is a classic thriller with a flawed heroine who has almost superheroic physical skills and stamina. It’s definitely literary cotton candy that will sweep you out of ordinary reality. That makes it a great pool or plane book. If you like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, you’ll probably like this one. Charlie hasn’t yet acquired Reacher’s unshakeable self-confidence, but she does share his military training, shooting skills, courage and physical stamina. 

As of April 2018, there are 12 Charlie Fox books:

• Killer Instinct. Meet Charlotte “Charlie” Fox, a self-defense instructor with a shady military background and a painful past.
• Riot Act. Charlie is now working at gym, when she runs into Sean Meyer, the Army training instructor she fell hard for but who wasn’t there when she needed him most.
• Hard Knocks. Charlie goes undercover to a body guard training school at Sean’s request.
• First Drop. Sean and Charlie go to Florida in this Barry Award-nominated thriller. This is Charlie’s first official assignment as a bodyguard protecting a teenage client.
• Road Kill. The nightmare Charlie experienced in her Florida assignment have left her in limbo about her life and her career.
• Second Shot.
• Third Strike. Charlie and Sean are living together in New York City and working for Parker Armstrong’s close protection agency.
• Fourth Day. A Barry Award nominee, this book takes Charlie undercover to extract a client from the Fourth Day Cult in California.
• Fifth Victim. Charlie is faced with preventing a kidnap plot involving the Long Island jetset.
• Die Easy. Charlie and Sean are involved in a close protection detail at a post-Katrina charity fundraiser when they are confronted by someone from their past.
• Absence of Light. Charlie is on her own in a disaster zone following a catastrophic earthquake.
• Fox Hunter. Charlie is sent to a war zone to find and stop Sean Meyers, who appears to have gone off the rails.