SCOTT EVERS

       Scott Evers is an agent with the National Security Agency.
       When we first meet him he is a drunk sitting alone on a park bench with a bottle in a paper bag and looking to the world as someone at the end of his rope. We learn in just another page it is all a set up but it really does a good job setting the reader up for an actual fall that Evers will take as the mission progresses. And while he will not fall as deep as the derelict he is impersonating, it will be a precipitous decline requiring some effort to rise again.
       Evers is 38 years old, married to Cynthia, a beautiful and pregnant woman 15 years his junior. He has been a field agent with the NSA for nearly 20 years according to one man's statement and from the sound of things they were not easy missions. He had hoped that the days of leaving home for weeks at a time would be over since he was married with a baby on the way but apparently not. This is strange since he should have some pull - his father-in-law was and had been for some time the Chairman of the National Security Council.
       But life will not be kind to Evers and he will see it get unkinder still. The drinking we watched him pretend to do at the beginning will be increasingly more real and his relationship with his much loved wife will get more and more strained and while he struggles to find a way to save his marriage, people he meet keep trying to kill him. He should have gotten used to it for he has known fighting for most of his adult life. As he put it, "A few too many duties. A few too many wars. Then field operations for the [NSA], a few more unnamed wars".

       I had trouble with this series. Twice. When I first started it many months ago, I could not make any sense out of what was happening. Evers was undercover - or maybe he wasn't. He was happily married to Cynthia who was expecting their first child but then maybe it was not so happy, though I had no idea why. As the story progressed, so did my confusion. So I quit and made a First Look entry and promised to come back to it. When I did, I started from the beginning and immediately got confused again.
       To me it was like the author was writing a mystery-spy-action novel in which it was vital to keep the mystery going by not explaining things to me, the reader. I always have trouble with that.