SAMANTHA REID

Samantha Reid is Deputy Assistant to the President for Homeland Security.

She answers directly to a man named Greg Barnes, the head of the White House Office of Homeland Security. Later in the series, that position will become hers.

Reid is very good at her job but then again, Reid is very good at anything she puts her mind to and when she was asked to move to the still new Homeland Security, she worked hard to make sure she brought herself up to the task. Her route to the position was not through normal Intelligence channels but came because of Director Barnes.

"When the President asked [Barnes] to be his White House Chief of Homeland Security, figuring he would be a great mouthpiece for the administration, he took Samantha with him. Now, every time there was even the hint of a new threat to the country's national security, the television stations clamored for [his] take on the situation which meant Samantha often felt like an adjunct to the White House speechwriters; office, except she wasn't writing for the president, which would have been a total head trip. No. She was writing sound bites for the biggest egomaniac on the staff."

She had come to work for Barnes thanks to an offer by him to help at Energy. "After she had graduated from Princeton with majors in English Lit and Geology, Samantha had quickly figured out she couldn't make a living with the English part, but Geology opened a whole raft of job offers. Her dad was in the oil and gas business, she had been raised near the Texas oil fields, and it was only natural that she would feel quite at home with a subject where she already knew the history as well as the lingo."

It was while working with a consulting firm in the energy sector that an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal caught the eye of then Energy Department Director Barnes who invited her to join his agency. Some time after she came onboard, he made the lateral move to Homeland, taking her with him.

Reid is not a field agent and would never claim to be. She does, indirectly at first and then directly later control quite a few of them and as we see in these adventures of hers, she is thrown into the thick of things herself more than once.

I am a sucker for any series showing the inner workings of people and departments inside government. Even when they are shown to be largely as mundane and commonplace as everywhere else - except for the whole being the seat of power sort of thing.

When this author writes about such things, having been there and done that for some time, the prose comes across so much more real and more believable and, truth be told, more worrisome. Especially when we are shown that people like Samantha Reid might be really good and really dedicated at their jobs but they are also and always really just human beings.

Scary to think about but great fun to read about.

I liked the author's first series but this one shows a lot of improvement in writing style and is even better. I look forward to what she come up with next.