LISA WYCHERLY

Lisa Wycherly is an agent with Operation Quickline.

More on that organization in a moment.

First, some info on Wycherly. She isn't an agent when we first meet her. She is a laid-off community college teacher (budget cuts) who is being evicted from her apartment because she is late in her rent and is about to move temporarily into her sister's house but that is way crowded with kids, all in preparation for having to move back home to live with her parents. Plus she is on a blind date with a man who is obviously expecting something from the salad he just paid for and she is a young woman who has long before decided sex belonged in a marriage.

The year is 1982 and Wycherly does not have a lot of choices that appeal to her and that is when ever-so-handsome-and-sophisticated Sid Hackbirn happens to run into and saves her from the blind date and buys her a better dinner and does not expect anything in return. In fact, three days later he offers her a job. And a place to stay. And still no strings other than she be a good administrative assistant.

So, what does all this have to do with being a spy for this secret American intelligence organization? And what is this Operation Quickline?

We learn about it when she does as she is being told, which is: "Within the structures of the FBI and CIA are several smaller organizations. Organizations so secret that mostly only their members know they exist. Operation Quickline was one of these. Our core mission was to move information around, and that was mostly what we did. However, every so often something would come up that was too hot for regular law enforcement and we'd get called in to deal with it." That is a description given in one of the many adventures we have of Wycherly since she accepted the added role of being Hackbirn's espionage partner, already being, as mentioned, his secretary.

As stated, the people of Quickline find most of their work being highly covert couriers of all sorts of things but it seems just as often they are asked to look into this or check out that and on more than a few occasions, people seem determined to cause severe physical harm to both Wycherly and Hackbirn.

Survival is sometimes tricky. Which means, of course, that over time romance between the two of them was bound to happen.

The now baker's dozen adventures of Lisa Wycherly working for and falling in love with and eventually marrying agent Sid Hackbirn are delightfully entertaining cozy-spy tales. There is suspense and excitement and thrills and dangers and romance and heartache and all sorts of things that luckily for me I do NOT have to deal with - like people trying to kill me or some woman from my past showing up with a son I did not know about and then dying and leaving me that pre-teen. Yikes!

I loved the fact that the author, Ann Louise Bannon, chose to have these tales take place in the early 80s, a time which now seem to be a lot simpler than today. They were not, of course, not in the least, but we can pretend. I hope that there will be more tales coming as the lives of these characters are ever changing and I sorta want to know what comes next.