A Price to Pay

November 4, 2013
Simms comes up with some interesting plot hooks in this otherwise unremarkable thriller—his second featuring Det. Constable Iona Khan (after 2013’s Scratch Deeper). She is a typically atypical police heroine: half-Scottish, half-Pakistani, with a math degree, assigned to the U.K. Counter Terrorism Unit based near Manchester. Iona lands an unusual case involving several missing teenage girls who all bought used laptops from Eamon Heslin, a computer store owner whose incinerated corpse was just found. What’s more, she discovers a link between the case and a suicide bombing on the Israeli-Lebanese border. It was apparently carried out by a girl from Manchester, 17-year-old Jade Cummings, but the reader already knows that Jade was not aware that explosives were strapped to her body at the time. Iona must race to foil a potentially devastating terrorist attack on British soil. As in the previous volume, surprise and memorable scenes or characters are at a minimum.

January 1, 2014
The illegal sale of refurbished laptops places Manchester's Counterterrorism Unit on a collision course with Mossad. A reconditioned Dell Latitude for less than 300 seems like a dream come true to university student Philip Young. But when he finds profile pictures of young girls with names like Shandy, Aisha, Rihanna and Zara in the carrying case, he turns them over to the police. Aisha turns out to be a young runaway named Teah Rice who jumped to her death from a highway overpass the week before. Zara's (real name Jade Cummings) story is even more harrowing: Her picture matches that of a suicide bomber who blew herself up at the Lebanon border, taking four Israeli soldiers with her. The police call in CTU, including DC Iona Khan (Scratch Deeper, 2013), a young Scottish-Pakistani working hard to fit in. Iona's instincts are sharp. She's sure that whoever is behind the girls' deaths is trafficking young women. But tracking down the other laptops sold by the same shady dealer takes time the CTU doesn't have. They know that Israel won't let their soldiers' deaths go unavenged. Even now, Mossad agents are in the U.K., watching Iona and her colleague Martin Everington. Can Martin and Iona find the source of the laptops, and the source of the women, in time to keep them out of Mossad's reach? And can they learn to trust each other as partners soon enough to solve this crime? Iona's second adventure is long on tension but short on logic.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2014

Highly competitive and fiercely independent, biracial (Pakistani-Scot) DC Iona Khan works in Manchester's Counter Terrorism Unit, which is investigating a horrifying sex trade ring that uses young British women as suicide bombers. An incident at the Israeli-Lebanese border traces back to Manchester, and Iona's team must ascertain how the girls are moved out of Britain. Key to the case is a batch of laptop computers that were sold under the table to unsuspecting college students. All the buyers are now being killed systematically; apparently, information related to the bombing is on one of the hard drives. The number of missing laptops is dwindling, bodies are piling up, and two teenage girls are still missing. There's not a minute to spare in this pulse-racing thriller. VERDICT Short and easy to follow, Simms's gritty sophomore entry (after Scratch Deeper) races at sprinter's pace from the get-go. Iona Khan is a welcome addition to the up-and-coming generation of UK police detectives; the series would pair well with S.J. Bolton or Harry Bingham titles.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2013
For the Manchester Counter Terrorism Unit, an unusual suicide bombing in the Mideast turns into a case involving exploited teenage girls. The bomber, who blows up herself and four Israeli soldiers at the Israel-Lebanon border, is found to be a British teenager missing from a residential care home. When profiles of four girls, including the bomber and a recent suicide, are found in the carrying case of a newly fenced laptop, sold by a man whose body is discovered in his burned-out shop, a link is made to the theft of four laptops from an office by one of its Pakistani employees. Detective Constable Iona Khan senses that the investigation has taken a wrong turn, as police eventually are just steps behind whoever is murdering the laptop buyers, and she herself becomes a target in an international scheme. In her second appearanceafter Scratch Deeper, 2013Khan, still wary after ill treatment by her former CTU supervisor, proves an appealing protagonist with staying power in this face-paced, well-crafted procedural with a plot that seems horrifyingly plausible.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)