SAMANTHA ALBRIGHT

       Samantha Albright is an agent with the CIA.
       I guess that is technically correct but in truth she is more a conscripted civilian forced to go undercover to watch a person she was close to. Then things start to get really out of control and she has to take more of an active role in bringing down some very nasty terrorists.
       When we meet her, Albright is a 25-year-old part-time bookkeeper and part-time student. She hailed from a poor farm in Alabama where her home life had gotten particularly unpleasant during her teen years. After graduation she had met a charming up-and-coming man who enchanted her and then married her and suddenly her life was filled with trips abroad and fancy parties and a style she had never even imagined growing up. That lasted only a couple of years before her husband's drug habit got very bad and his paranoid control of her became too much. After the divorce, for which she asked and expected nothing, life went back to a simpler level.
       That is until a budding fling she had allowed herself with a professor at the college she was attending in her spare time dropped her into a major mess where she is co-opted into helping Special Agent Taillefer of the FBI (so he led to believe) and her life takes a major change.
       Albright is by and large a normal woman who gets pulled unbidden into a world of terrorist-recruiting which will lead to having to deal with the power behind the recruiters and the frightening plans they are concocting. She is only asked to be eyes and ears on a participant but she will find herself far deeper than she or her handlers ever expected.

       I really liked Albright and as long as the story hangs around her and her thoughts, I was happy. Unfortunately the bad guys she is forced to meet and deal with tend to expound on their beliefs and their motivations to the point that I would start skimming over the diatribe. Mind you, and this is sort of important, their ramblings fit perfectly into the storyline so they are by no means out of place in the plotline. They just get really long-winded and very much 'heard-it-all-before'
       The second adventure is better, for me, that the first because I spent a lot of the first book miffed at the FBI/CIA agents who put Albright into the situation she was in. The second book had her going into things with her eyes a bit more open and she shows that her brain was fully functioning as well. Good for her!