FORTUNE REDDING

Fortune Redding is an agent with the CIA.

She is, more specifically, an assassin with the Agency, taking out targets deemed in need of removal. She is very good at it - maybe too good. A fellow agent remarked, not inaccurately, that her "hit count makes Attila the Hun look like a pacifist". Mind you, Redding is not particularly blood-thirsty nor is she cavalier about taking someone out. She just falls into the darnedest situations where fighting back is required and she fights back really well.

When we meet her, though, she is hiding up in Louisiana and that state will never be the same. She did not want to be there and she knew she would fit in there as well as a duck in a desert but she has no choice.

On her latest mission, she was undercover delivering a payment to the world's biggest illegal arms dealer, Ahmad. Unfortunately, it was discovered too late that there was a horrible leak in the Agency and her cover was blown before she stepped foot into the hotel suite where the meet was taking place. She walked into a death trap dressed to kill in a slinky dress and stiletto heels and no place to hide a weapon, unaware that the brother of Ahmad was set to eliminate her. Stiletto heels can be pretty dangerous, it seems. To attackers.

Now, unfortunately, thanks to the rat in the CIA and her having put that heel into the eye socket of the only sibling of a very powerful and very deadly man, Redding's life is soon to be over. "Seeing [her] dead has become the personal agenda of one of the biggest arms dealers of the decade...He's offering one million to anyone who brings [her] body to him. Ten million if someone brings [her] in alive."

So for her own safety until they can get a line on the mole and on the arms-dealer, Redding just go into hiding.

Enter the niece of the CIA Director. Lovely young woman, former beauty queen and currently working as a librarian. She has recently inherited a house in Louisiana from a great-aunt and was heading there to inventory things and get it ready to sell. Instead, her uncle pays for a summer in Europe so he can send Redding there in her place, taking the identity of Sandy-Sue Morrow.

Since the niece had never been there and no one knew what she looked like, it was a perfect cover.

Except that Redding is a trained assassin whose hair is cut as short as can be and still be hair and whose only use for makeup is to use it while undercover to take someone out (not on a date).

And the folks she meets in Sinful, the name of the town in the bayou, are as interesting as her. It hardly takes a day before Redding becomes enmeshed in murder (she didn't kill this one). And that is just the start.

Okay okay! This is not really a spy series, except of course it is!

From the beginning we have illegal arms dealing and a mole in the CIA and lots of mayhem. Then we have the need for the operative to go undercover while the Agency rat is smoked out before the agent can go after the bad guy. That pretty good spy action drama right there.

But then things go wonderfully sideways.

Sinful, Louisiana is a small town but the things that go on there show clearly small town life can be murder! And who better to go into hiding in such a place as the most active killer the government has?

But Fortune Redding, who tries to be ready for anything at any time, is not ready for Ida Belle, head of the Sinful Ladies Society, the real power in the community. And there is her best friend Gertie who drives like a maniac and who refuses to wear her glasses so maniac gets a double meaning. The three of them will become known as Sinful Team 3 and what a team!

These are zany cozy mystery murders with buckets of humor tossed on them and the spy-work takes a backseat to the looney goings-on in Sinful. Up until it moves to the front and makes the craziness get even wilder.

Oh, and one super strange thing is all the wild, outrageous events that slam into Fortune as she tries to 'lie-low' - they do not take place over time. They happen one immediately after another. We are not talking months and months here. Think days and weeks. No rest for the Sinful.

I found myself reading the first couple of adventures and then heading to go to a "serious" spy series or two and then going back to Sinful for another escapade, leaving that community for another series or two and then coming back again. Rinse and repeat. I cannot get enough of Fortune, Ida Belle, Gertie, Ally, and even Deputy Carter.

I hope Sinful Team 3 stay busy for a long time.