The Book Gourmet

Prudence Hill, the daughter of the British Prime Minister, has been kidnapped and Joshua Lazlo, the operative of the super secret Lazlo Group organization run by his uncle, is the man chosen to rescue her.He gets her out, races through the countryside in a hellish storm, but is the chit thankful? Oh, no, that's not Pru the Shrew. She challenges him at every occasion, she can't follow simple orders without asking questions, and she's simply a pain in Joshua firm behind.But as they run from her kidnappers, dodging bullets and jumping on freight trains, Joshua realizes, he likes those traits of her personality and maybe they'll stay alive long enough for him to try an mellow her out. At least a little bit.Mixed feelings with this one. Good suspense, nicely written stormy atmosphere that contributed to it, but since this is just the first in the six-book miniseries, there were no definite answers as to who kidnapped Pru and what grudge they held against the Lazlo Group. That was a bit frustrating, but I was already set on reading the entire series, anyway.The thing that bothered me the most was the poor characterization. Joshua appeared to have no personality at all, besides his Secret Agent Man tight-lipped, order-issuing persona. He seemed to be there just because the author wrote the story that way.Prudence was annoying as hell. She was an opinionated shrew without any solid reason or explanation for her behavior. Usually there's a backstory illustrating how the character got to be that way, but she just was that way and end of story.And I found the twist that actually stretched the rescue mission into the 234 pages long story a bit too cheap. They ran off the road, because he couldn't stand the pain of her bandaging his wounded leg. For someone obviously (and repeatedly confirmed by the author herself) trained to live on almost no sleep, no food, and to sustain severe pain, he just simply drove down the incline, smashed the car, and the two were now forced to spend a day together, running for their lives...Because the convenient electric storm shot the telephone network to hell.Yeah, right. I so believe that. Not.