Reviewer: Tracy Hurt Boston, MS

Is the action adventure series dead? If not, have they just become an endless sequence of the same old thing? If your answer is yes, then there is a treat in store for you. For this book, built around an adventure heroine, that's right heroine. Her name is Nina Steel. Nina, is the product of the human genetic engineering experiments of 2010, and she has a unique distaste for terrorists. Banking on Torture is an intriguing story about the not-so-distant future in which world banks are being victimized by powerful terrorists who are opposed by a handful of super commandos, genetically-engineered men and women led by the beautiful, but deadly Nina Steel. The story moves relentlessly in its search for exciting encounters as the action shifts from the Florida Keys to Chicago and back again, leaving a trail of corpses and battered bodies. From the first unusual torture victim washed up on a deserted beach with a tenacious hold on life the reader is aware that the violence is not merely gratuitous, but has a clear purpose in the plot. Banking on Torture is not all violence and carnage, of course, as there is also spicy romance and good-natured companionship, but the reader is never in doubt from the start that a powerful evil is abroad in the land, giving the plot an edge that is impossible to ignore. The banter and interplay between fighting men and women is rendered compellingly, which given the author's background comes as no real surprise. More indicative of the author's ability is the level of complexity in the book's pages, in which an international terrorist group has established a sophisticated base from which to extract billions in gold from world reserves.