THIRD STRIKE

Mysterious attacks on her parents lead a high-end security professional and her unflappable colleague/lover to take violent countermeasures.

The tough couple are superfit, upper-middle-class Englishwoman Charlotte “Charlie” Fox (née Foxcroft) and her even fitter, lower-middle-class boyfriend Sean Meyer, a team introduced in First Drop (2005). Working for a top-of-the-line New York security company, Charlie is hoping to wind up the rehab necessitated by a double gunshot blast on her last assignment so she can get back in the harness. But she’s thrown from the treadmill by a shocking interview on the television overhead: Her father, a surgeon at the top of his profession, is for some reason in New York confessing to the world his drinking problem and its effect on his work. Charlie and Dr. Foxcroft do not get along, but she smells something a bit rotten. For starters, when did he become a drunk? After she witnesses his abduction to a bordello for a photo op, she knows something is Awfully Wrong, a state confirmed by a phone call to a clearly agitated Mum back in England. But her father won’t let her help him, so Charlie and Sean (whose red-hot relationship is a problem with Dad) fly over to rescue Mum from the clutches of a very nasty American blonde and her thickly muscular assistant. The evil couple is quickly, brutally overpowered and thrown to the swine by our heroes, who return to NYC with Mrs. Foxcroft. All this framing and menacing has to do with the experimental osteoporosis drug Dr. Foxcroft administered to a dying friend and the eagerness of Storax, the drug’s manufacturer, to keep under wraps its calamitous side effects until vast profits are realized. Storax, by the way, has an ally in the federal agency that employed the nasty blonde. It all comes to a boil in Texas.

Old-fashioned formula mayhem in slick new wrappings. Pleasant enough.