“Peo­ple like you don’t retire. They die.”—72 Hours

72 Hours by Shannon Stacey (Samhain ebooks)Shan­non Stacey’s 72 Hours from Samhain Pub­lish­ing, LTD was a very quick read and a good one at that. The story is action packed and the pace never really slows down. I was sucked in from the start. We have secret babies, secret identities–two of my least favorite themes but the author made it work.

Alex Rossi leads a dou­ble life in order to entice a killer out of his hid­ing place. Alex has waited years to get revenge for his mother’s mur­der so he pre­tends to be Sean Devlin, head of the Devlin Group. A group of secret oper­a­tives set out to save the world from the bad guys.

Mean­while, Grace Nolan has retired from field­work, opt­ing to be a stay at home mom to her son, Danny, but her past comes back to haunt her and threaten her child. Instincts from the job just don’t go away. Thus, Danny is kid­napped and held for lever­age in order to bring Alex Rossi in within 72 hours. Unfortunately, Alex and Grace share a his­tory rid­dled with secrets, mis­un­der­stand­ings and past hurts. Even­tu­ally, both come together for what mat­ters most and are will­ing to sac­ri­fice all it takes to get a mur­derer: dead or alive.

If you enjoy action packed sto­ries then this is the novel for you. It’s a quick read and a rather short one, too. I had fun read­ing it. The story is not orig­i­nal as we have a secret baby theme here but the author makes it fresh and original. The dia­logue is snappy. The hero­ine is pretty strong, she can take care of her­self. Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion was pretty decent but if you don’t care for action scenes — maybe you should think twice.

There was one thread that was not clear to me and that dealt with Alex Rossi/Sean Devlin’s rela­tion­ship to Grace Nolan. I thought they were friends but the author delves more into this thread as a means to keep the two apart because of Alex’s duplic­ity. I didn’t real­ize that they’d been that close to mat­ter much. Grace even men­tions that Sean was her best friend. All that was pro­logue, obviously.  Also, much of what Grace told Sean/Alex should have  clued him in that he had a son  but the pic­tures she sent Sean Devlin aka Alex Rossi were not clear shots of him to deter­mine oth­er­wise. Just a mother pro­tect­ing her son, I guess. And Danny’s accep­tance of things after the take down of the bad guys was a lit­tle too pat but this is fic­tion after all.

72 Hours gets a strong rec­om­mend from me. I enjoyed this title very much. B+