The Chase

Great destinies are never for the faint-hearted in Brenda Joyce's romantic thrillers, and never has that been more true than in The Chase, the tale of a 50-year-old horror and its shocking legacy for an innocent woman. Busy, beautiful Claire Hayden, wife of a prominent San Francisco attorney, heiress to a tidy fortune, and fundraiser for numerous pet causes, watches her superficially secure life unravel during her husband's 40th-birthday party. Not only does Claire decide in the midst of festivities that she wants a divorce, but she discovers her preoccupied spouse gruesomely murdered, her assets evaporated, and a handsome stranger igniting her repressed sexual passion.

Faced with dark, new challenges, Claire toughens up in the gales of a multigenerational mystery, including the nightmarish possibility that her own father has been an assassin since the 1940s. Crucial to the story is Claire's ticklish crime-solving partnership with sexy Nazi-hunter Ian Marshall; unfortunately, their love-hate, bicker-flirt relationship quickly becomes monotonous. Far better is the tragic, evocative subplot concerning the marriage of a poor, orthodox Jew and a Christian aristocrat in pre-World War II Britain. In The Chase, the past always lurks, like a killer biding his time, behind the enigmas of one's life. --Tom Keogh