Elizabeth Stride has come to Hilton Head Island to escape her past as "the Black Angel"--a ruthless assassin--and to escape Martin Kessler, a fellow operative who owned a piece of her soul. But just as she's begun to rebuild her shattered life, Kessler reappears, toppling Elizabeth's protective wall of anonymity.

A teenage girl about to be abducted from an exclusive nearby tennis club--a girl who unwittingly holds the key to horrific planned act of terrorism. By joining forces in a daring rescue of the girl, Elizabeth and Martin will be forced to put their fates in each other's hands one more time--and decide once and for all if they are to live together or apart. In doing so, they will be drawn into a secret war of fanaticism, greed, and doomsday technology.

And there will be no haven.

Elizabeth Stride--known as the "Black Angel" when she worked for Israeli intelligence--chooses the quiet island of Hilton Head off the Carolina coast as her retirement home. She changes her hairstyle and color, takes golf and tennis lessons, and meets a kind doctor named Jonathan--a man her ex-lover, East German spy Martin Kessler, would have called dull. "In truth, Jonathan was a bit dull ... but she now aspired to dullness. She also, however, aspired to a sex life, and that was her one and only problem with him. The flesh on both sides was willing enough but Jonathan Leidner was a doctor, not only a doctor, but a surgeon. He would know bullet wounds if he saw them." It turns out that hiding her bullet wounds in bed are the least of Elizabeth's problems in John R. Maxim's exciting and inventive thriller. Kessler's attempt to relight old fires just happens to coincide with Islamic terrorists planning to attack a local tennis tournament, so Elizabeth's search for a quiet life lasts for very few pages. John Maxim's equally enjoyable The Shadow Box is available in paperback.

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