Death Echo (St. Kilda Series #4)

by Elizabeth Lowell

Overview

“Elizabeth Lowell has long set a standard of excellence for thrillers that never stint on either romance or suspense.”
—BookPage

 

New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Lowell cuts a razor-sharp new edge in romantic suspense with Death Echo, a thrilling tale of passion, danger, and international intrigue. A breakneck-paced novel that unites a beautiful former CIA agent with a tough and haunted ex-Special Forces operative, Death Echo is a top-rank thriller in the vein of Iris Johansen, Tami Hoag, and Lisa Gardner—and a dazzling example of the superior storytelling that inspired author Jayne Ann Krentz to declare, “I’ll buy anything with Elizabeth Lowell’s name on it.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061664427
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/25/2011
Series:	St. Kilda Series , #4
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	402,728
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Lowell has more than eighty titles published to date with over twenty-four million copies of her books in print. She lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her husband, with whom she writes novels under a pseudonym. Her favorite activity is exploring the Western United States to find the landscapes that speak to her soul and inspire her writing.

Date of Birth:

April 5, 1944

Place of Birth:

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Education:

B. A., University of California, 1966

Editorial Reviews

In Lowell’s well-crafted fifth St. Kilda Consulting thriller (after Blue Smoke and Murder), Manhattan operative Emma Cross travels to Seattle, Wash., where Blackbird, a yacht purported to contain enough explosives to destroy a major U.S. city, is being offloaded from a container ship. Posing as the representative of a buyer interested in the yacht, Emma connects with MacKenzie “Mac” Durand, Blackbird’s transit captain, who’s supposed to deliver the boat to a commissioning yard in the San Juan Islands. Emma and Mac, who has a background in special ops, wind up becoming unlikely allies on a dangerous sea journey in which they find themselves succumbing to their mutual attraction. Forced into a high stakes encounter with a pair of Russian spies, they come to realize that the scope of their mission is much greater than they at first assumed. Lowell’s primary focus on espionage rather than on romance is a major change from earlier novels, albeit a pleasing one. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Beth McDonald's precise narration delivers all the tension of this latest installment in the St. Kilda Consulting series. Former CIA agent Emma Cross, a beauty with brains, has a week to solve a case involving the disappearance of two yachts, one of which may be loaded with a nasty surprise. When she enlists the help of hunky Mac Durand, a transit captain for one of the boats and a former soldier with talents of his own, romance ignites. McDonald's well-acted narration adds to the excitement in this fast-paced story of love and danger on the high seas. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2010 - AudioFile

An international espionage crisis mixes with lighthearted romance on the high seas. Former CIA operative Emma Cross works for St. Kilda's Consulting, a private-investigating company run by Joe Faroe and his wife Grace, both familiar to Lowell fans from The Wrong Hostage (2006) and now proud parents of a baby who distracts them during every phone call and meeting. St. Kilda's has been looking for stolen yachts but the stakes skyrocket with word that a boat named the Blackbird is arriving at a small port on Elliott Bay near Seattle loaded with ammunition-whether biological, chemical or fissionable-to destroy a large American city within the next seven days. St. Kilda's is enlisted to help stop the perpetrators of the urban devastation before it happens. When the boat arrives, Emma keeps an eye on Mac Durand, who was hired to captain the Blackbird as far as Elliott Bay by a local shady transporting company with links to a Russian breakaway state. Mac used to be a member of Special Ops until a CIA screw-up caused the death of most of his unit; like everyone else in this book, he now distrusts government. Then his oldest friend, who was scheduled to sail the Blackbird north to Canada, dies under mysterious circumstances, and Mac agrees to work for St. Kilda's. Posing as lovers, hunky Mac and gorgeous Emma sail the Blackbird together into Canadian waters hoping to flush out the Eastern European politico-criminal elements behind the plot. Lowell's short chapters, each headed with date, time and location, bring to mind TV's 24, but despite the looming seven day deadline, there's little real sense of urgency. Though refreshingly cynical, the complicated political machinations remain underdeveloped. Lowell's main focus, beside an appreciation for high-end boating, is the sexual heat building between Mac and Emma, who banter on unperturbed that time is running out before Seattle blows. The predictable romance decreases the suspense in this low-wattage thriller.

Kirkus Reviews