Review – Finding Marie

Like many good mysteries, Finding Marie takes the reader through multiple conflicts and danger into a nightmare chase where life and death are the only choices. Choices that twenty-two-year-old Marie, wife of naval lieutenant Pierre Belanger, is unsuited for-although her husband travels on frequent covert missions, Marie is unsophisticated and na?ve. She only knows not to ask questions and Pierre doesn’t want to jeopardize his mission by talking.

As the story begins, Marie is waiting at the Narita airport to board a plane for the United States. Her husband’s tour in Japan has ended, and he plans to join her in three weeks. When Marie’s plane lands in San Francisco, Marie reaches for her cell phone to call Pierre before boarding the connecting flight. When she can’t find it, she searches her carry-on luggage and finds a small plastic case shaped like a pack of gum. Unfamiliar with computers except for sending e-mail messages she doesn’t realize she is looking at a thumb-flash drive or does she know who slipped it into her luggage. However, having it in her possession will take her across the eastern seaboard in an attempt to outrun the Asian mafia, who are desperate to retrieve the information she carries.

Add the shocking murder of her seat mate in the airport restroom, and Marie’s fears and imagination go into overdrive. When scar-faced Asian men attempt to grab her in the airport, Marie knows she has to run. They intend to kill her.

While Marie is on the run, Pierre and his best friend Lt. Commander George Hudson team up to find her, but they’re a step behind the Asian mafia who always stay one step ahead of them. Frustrated and desperate, they call in the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS).

Davis’s pacing is intense, and her writing style is evocative and descriptive. The chase is suspenseful and realistic as multiple story lines unite. Marie uses imaginative disguises, city cabs, and even hitchhikes with dangerous truckers to escape, but the Asian mafia remains on her heels. An engaging romantic sub-plot and many secondary characters add to the suspense. The use of French words is distracting but not a deterrent. A constant thread of prayer is tightly woven throughout the story. Finding Marie, second in the Frasier Island series intertwines faith, honor, espionage, suspense, and courage against the backdrop of family, love, deceit and betrayal in this exciting contemporary adventure. Readers of the romance-suspense genre will enjoy this one.