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THE BLONDE IDENTITY by Ally Carter

THE BLONDE IDENTITY

by Ally Carter

Pub Date: Aug. 8th, 2023
ISBN: 9780063276642
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins

A woman with amnesia gets tangled up in the world of international espionage.

On a cold, snowy night in Paris, a woman (eventually she’ll discover her name is Zoe) finds herself on the street with no idea of who she is or how she got there. She’s rescued from a team of menacing strangers by a spy named Jake Sawyer. He explains that his partner, Alex, who’s Zoe’s identical twin, has gone missing. Alex infiltrated the organization of a dangerous Russian oligarch named Kozlov. Before going on the run, she copied and then destroyed the originals of Kozlov’s personal encrypted files—including everything from his bank accounts to his personal contacts. Kozlov and his henchmen will do anything to find Alex, but every international spy agency in the world is also on the hunt for the flash drive, hoping to use the data to cripple Kozlov’s criminal empire. Sawyer and Zoe spend most of the book on the run from Kozlov and eventually go undercover as newlyweds on a river cruise. Finally able to pause and strategize, they hatch a plan to infiltrate Alex’s Swiss bank account in Zurich. Zoe can access the bank disguised as her sister, looking for clues that will help them find her twin and the flash drive. The novel is a clichéd mishmash of plots, tropes, and archetypes from espionage thrillers. There is little depth or nuance to either Zoe or Sawyer as characters, and their romance is shallow and underdeveloped. Long action sequences and chase scenes drive most of the book, but the plot is so blandly predictable that the result is more frantic than fulfilling.

Flimsy and insubstantial.