Road Kill

[Lesa Holstine]

Zoё Sharp revs up the tension in Road Kill, a Charlie Fox thriller. Road Kill serves as a transition piece. Charlie needed downtime after her job in Florida, an experience related in First Drop. She needed time to regroup and make decisions about her feelings for her boss and lover, Sean Meyer, and her current job as a bodyguard, working in Sean's close protection business. Instead, she's thrust into a world of motorcycle racing and danger.

While trying to find some peace working on her parents' second home, Charlie answers a frantic call that a friend has been crushed in a motorcycle accident, run over by a van that might have intended to hit her and the man killed on the bike. Clare's partner, Jacob, is somewhere in Ireland, and needs to be informed of the accident. Charlie is suspicious of Clare's story of the ride, and subsequent events at Clare's house and a funeral only add to her doubts. When Jacob's son, Jamie, sneaks into the house, Clare is wary. When she's brutally attacked by Jacob's ex-wife and her boyfriend, she and Sean are angry. Wild stories circulate about the motorcycle accident, and Clare's actions do nothing to stem the speculation. Instead, she and Jacob ask Charlie to watch over Jamie on an organized motorcycle trip to Ireland, with members of the Devil's Bridge riders. Despite their misgivings, Charlie and Sean head to Ireland with the group, knowing they don't know the whole story behind the trip.

Road Kill is an action packed story of motorcycles and violence. However, it is also an intimate book, as Charlie Fox delves into her own feelings, about her relationship with Sean, her past, her thorny relations with her parents, and her future. Sharp may have been talking about a bike, but one paragraph on page 173 sums up Charlie's current issues, problems with the case, her career, and her relationship with Sean. "Now, I'd climbed aboard something with outrageous speed and power that just begged me to lean that little bit further, push that little bit harder. Something that coaxed and beguiled and seduced me to take another risk. And would kill me in a heartbeat if I let it get away from me."

Zoё Sharp's Road Kill might not be a necessary read in between First Drop and the latest Charlie Fox book, Second Shot. But, for readers to know and understand Charlie, it's an important link.

Zoё Sharp's website is www.zoesharp.com

Road Kill by Zoё Sharp. Piatkus, ©2005, ISBN 0-7499-3616-9 (paperback), 392p.