KELLY JAMES

Kelly James is an agent of IPNC.

The Information Protection National Concern is a small branch of the American intelligence community tasked with keeping the country safe which it does by maintaining a small group of highly skilled young operatives known as the Specialists.

These teenage agents come from a wide range of backgrounds and histories but they share several things in common vital to their success in the group. First, they are all orphans, or as good as, people with no one else to care what happens to them. "System kids that screwed up somehow. Nobody even knows they're gone." Second, they each were incredibly good in one field and while the people at IPNC helped round out their education, both academically and operationally, whatever talent their specialty was got major attention.

Thomas Liba, aka TL, is the division head of IPNC responsible for the Specialists. He ran a small facility in California titled "San Belden Ranch For Boys and Girls". On the surface, literally, it was at it seemed but the true business of the organization was conducted and it was there that plans for missions were developed as well as any unique tools needed were prepared.

Kelly James was a child prodigy when it came to computers. She was a certified genius having an I.Q. measured at 191. Her parents were killed in a plane crash when she was 6, one she managed to survive. Since then she had been bounced from one foster home to some orphanage to another foster parent which just did not work out.

This left her with deep feelings of inferiority despite being smart enough to have already finished high school and being a senior in college. And despite being quite a pretty blonde with a very nice figure that she tended to hide. It was not clear where her klutziness was a product of her lack of confidence or just another reason for it but if she could walk into an obstruction, she did.

For a couple of years, TL had followed her life and looked for a way to coerce her into joining. When no opportunity came because she never strayed over any line, he fabricated a way by using 18-year-old drop-dead handsome David, already an agent, into convincing her to hack into the government records to find out about his father. She fell for it and got quite a ways into top secret archives before the boom fell.

Her option was jail or the Specialists. She chose the latter. Now she is renamed Kelly Spree, aka Gigi (for Genius Girl) and she is quickly leaving the gawky introverted girl far behind.

It might seem a tad on the creepy side for a man in his 60's to be reading a series meant for teenagers about a 16-year-old girl. (Might?) But I had to read the first to write about the series and when that got done, I was curious what would happen next to Kelly James, aka Gigi, so I started the second book. And then the third just had to be checked out. The fourth, I mean, come-on! I really wanted to know. Finally the fifth and last was consumed.

And the author said at the end that with sadness she was moving on to other things. Kinda made me glad, though, because I needed to move on as well as apparently I was addicted.

These are good books for their intended age-groups (and obviously some weirdos like me a tad beyond that limit). If they had been around when I was a teenager, I would have suffered the opprobrium from my older sister and read them with delight. As a senior citizen nowadays, I still enjoyed them.

I wish Kelly James good luck in the now-to-be unscripted future.