VENGEANCE IS HERS

As a top Italian industrialist, Veronica Contessa Rocco di Torrepadula routinely employs bodyguards (BGs). But when her woman close protection officer lets her down in a submachinegun attack, she is forced to replace her with a man: Simon Shearer, Aussie working with a UK private intelligence office, also SAS-trained BG.Shearer is used to being BG for temperamental principals, but when Veronica repeatedly ignores his advice, he considers resigning. Only the determination shown by Detta - the Countess’s daughter, often at odds with her mother - keeps Shearer in the game. Detta plays a key role in countering her mother’s dangerous wilfulness in Santa Fe, New Mexico.Evidence trickles out, suggesting that the mystery vendetta is being waged by a cult that exercises mind control over its members...by misusing Gladion, a drug made by one of Veronica’s companies.Greater detail emerges when another would-be assassin is captured before he can fire on Veronica. It’s Gareth, a young Englishman with his mind messed up through a girlfriend breakup and the lures - and the deadly demands - of the cult. Betrayal follows betrayal as the action moves from Rome to southern France, then to North Cyprus. Shearer finds himself supersonic in an F16 fighter of the Turkish air force, then lands in the back seat of an old F4 Phantom, racing to halt a plot that involves arson and risks murder.But Shearer sticks his neck out and ends up in the hands of opposition forces. Now it’s not just Gareth who has to be silenced - it’s Shearer as well. Shearer turns the tables when he’s dumped into a snake pit. But, escaping, he has to get Detta as well as Gareth to safety alongside himself. Then Gareth stops a bullet...