Book Reviews

Book Blurb

It’s 1996, and Mark Vincent, senior special agent of the Washington Bureau of Investigation and Security, is sent on assignment to Prague to cancel the head of a terrorist organization. He has no doubt it will be a simple operation. After all, he’s the best, isn’t he?

Only another member of the WBIS gets involved, and when everything goes south -- including the loss of valued members of his team -- Mark vows to destroy the man responsible for this debacle.

Refused permission to return to the States and ordered to take time off to decompress, Mark heads to Paris, where he meets an attractive rent boy who introduces himself as Louis. Unable to resist, Mark, portraying an ordinary businessman, gives his name as Rick, and they spend the week together. However, neither man is what he portrays himself as.

With this unlikely pair, can this be the start of a beautiful friendship?

First edition published by Dreamspinner Press, October 2013.

Book Review

As the start of a series I have been wanting to read for a while, this short novella worked pretty well for me. Contrary to my expectations it is not about the two main characters (Mark and Quinn) of ‘Spy vs. Spook’, but I should have realized that when reading the blurb. Nevertheless, the picture this story draws of who Mark Vincent is and how he thinks is excellent, and some of the characters who get introduced, I guess, will play a bigger role as the series progresses. All in all, a solid introduction.

Mark works for one of those letter agencies whose existence is top secret, that is known by almost no one, and gets up to whatever “needs doing” that nobody else can do. In line with this secretive work environment, Mark is good at subterfuge, undercover shenanigans, and putting together more or less shady operations. I won’t go into the grisly details of everything that goes wrong before he is told to take two weeks off, but the long and short of it is that he ends up in Paris.

What he gets up to there, other than the obvious tourist stuff, is a weeklong, super-hot encounter with a man he thinks is a rent boy – only to discover that others can be as good at deception as Mark himself. Their sexual exploits take up most of the book, but there are a few surprises as well and I found the whole story to be very entertaining.

If you like your agents to be tough yet human, if you want to watch the somewhat unusual beginning of a friendship that might just serve both men well in the future, and if you’re looking for a read that is as hot as it is intriguing, then you might like this novella. It promises lots of action, revenge, and the secret operations that go with it in the installments that follow.

 

 

 

 

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Additional Information

Format	ebook
Length	Novella, 15808 words
Heat Level
Publication Date	24-August-2019
Price	$2.99 ebook
Buy Link	https://www.jms-books.com/ppa-c-290_297/the-start-of-a-beautiful-friendship-p-2926.html