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A PRICE TO PAY by Chris Simms

A PRICE TO PAY

by Chris Simms

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78029-050-8
Publisher: Creme de la Crime

The illegal sale of refurbished laptops places Manchester’s Counterterrorism Unit on a collision course with Mossad.

A reconditioned Dell Latitude for less than £300 seems like a dream come true to university student Philip Young. But when he finds profile pictures of young girls with names like Shandy, Aisha, Rihanna and Zara in the carrying case, he turns them over to the police. Aisha turns out to be a young runaway named Teah Rice who jumped to her death from a highway overpass the week before. Zara's (real name Jade Cummings) story is even more harrowing: Her picture matches that of a suicide bomber who blew herself up at the Lebanon border, taking four Israeli soldiers with her. The police call in CTU, including DC Iona Khan (Scratch Deeper, 2013), a young Scottish-Pakistani working hard to fit in. Iona’s instincts are sharp. She’s sure that whoever is behind the girls’ deaths is trafficking young women. But tracking down the other laptops sold by the same shady dealer takes time the CTU doesn’t have. They know that Israel won’t let their soldiers’ deaths go unavenged. Even now, Mossad agents are in the U.K., watching Iona and her colleague Martin Everington. Can Martin and Iona find the source of the laptops, and the source of the women, in time to keep them out of Mossad’s reach? And can they learn to trust each other as partners soon enough to solve this crime?

Iona’s second adventure is long on tension but short on logic.