LEINE BASSO

Leine Basso is a security consultant.

Well, there has to be some term that can describe what the woman is doing these days and that works better than most. She needs to eat and put a roof over her head so she has to earn money somehow and there is not a whole lot of careers that call for a background in being a government assassin taking out known terrorists around the world.

That is what Basso has been doing for far more years than she would like to remember and she was very, very good at it. When we first meet her she had some time before given up that career and was looking for the next phase of her life but later we are given a brief recounting of her final days in her previous profession.

Back then she had worked for a man named Eric who ran a small department called the Agency (almost certainly not the CIA) who took assignments to have certain people eliminated. "Her targets were the lowest of the low. She used to eliminate criminals who, if allowed to continue, would gladly take down the United States and her allies, or kill innocents in their quest for power." She had been doing this work for at least 15 years and was certainly one of Eric's top agents. "Leine thought through every action, treating each job like a chess match she was determined to win. By staying several steps ahead of her competition, she minimized blowback."

She had tired of her career and was starting to suspect that Eric was no longer on the up-and-up when it came to her recent set of targets. She needed a change and she needed a chance to be a better mother to her now teenage daughter, April. Things did not end will with Eric but they did end and suddenly she was in need of something else to do.

Which takes us back to her being a security consultant. Or insurance investigator. Or bodyguard. Or private detective. She was really none of those or all of them as she took whatever gig seemed interesting. Up until she found out first-hand how prevalent and how disgusting human trafficking was and she became a part of Stop Human Enslavement Now (SHEN), an organization devoted to putting an end to modern slavery. In that new career she will restart her journeying around the globe going up against many of the same sort of low-lifes her previous life had her eliminating. While for SHEN she was not expected to be that extreme in her solutions, old habits do not go away easily.

From the first moment I met Leine Basso, I liked her.

I did not like the premise of the first adventure - a reality show about women dating serial killers - but that was only because it was such a stupid idea for a television show I was afraid some channel would steal the concept. Obviously the author thought it over-the-top enough to have Basso comment on it so but, golly gee, I hope it never comes to pass.

But I like Basso. She is the kind of character that always sits well with me. She is serious but does not take herself or others too seriously. She is not afraid of danger but she has no great desire to get into it, although she admits to loving excitement she is invariably going to put herself in peril. She is the kind of character I would love to see in a television series although I do not know if the person on the screen would be as much fun as the one in my head from reading the books.

The adventures seem to just get better and better as Basso goes all over the place fighting trafficking. And I cannot imagine where she will head to next, which is something else exciting about the series.