BLOOD VICTORY

A woman with an appalling past catches killers using superhuman powers.

Noah Turlington has invented Zypraxon, a drug with endless possibilities, and pharmaceutical company owner Cole Graydon, his friend and sometime lover, has helped him develop its powers. Cole has added partners to Project Bluebird, but despite their past difficulties, he trusts Noah more than their new investors to protect Charlotte Rowe, the only person they’ve found who can use her newfound powers without dying. Zypraxon turns Charley, whose mother was murdered by serial killers who then raised her until she escaped, into a person so strong she can rip anything apart with her bare hands. Now she’s made it her mission to track down murderers. Charley and her boyfriend, former lawman Luke Prescott, are on the trail of Cyrus Mattingly, a long-haul trucker who’s been kidnapping and killing women. Both hunters wears high-tech lenses that feed everything they see to Cole’s bunker in Kansas, from which he watches Charley troll Mattingly under a false identity in the hope that he’ll choose her as his next victim. The stakes are high because the only time Charley unleashes paradrenaline in her bloodstream, and the only time Project Bluebird can harvest her blood for use in prospective drugs, is when she’s genuinely terrified. While Cole and Noah secretly battle the partners, who see Charley as nothing but a lab rat and urge her to quit her hunt, Charley manages to get Mattingly to grab her, leading to a series of grisly and unexpected discoveries.

The third Burning Girl thriller lacks novelty but still has action aplenty for superhero fans.