Water memory A thriller

Readers starting this novel might wonder what sort of book they've wandered into. After a cracking opening, we learn about heroine Aubrey Sentro's personal problems, including her memories of a miserable childhood. Difficulties with her two children. Sadness at her husband's death. Blessedly, things start to cook around page 50, and the novel becomes a flash-bang actioner, limned in rich, organic prose. Aubrey has everybody, her kids included, thinking she's "some cubicle mouse at an insurance company," but we know she's a government-trained operative working for a company that specializes in returning kidnap victims to their families, "clueless people who think evil can't touch them." She's on a holiday when thugs board the freighter she's traveling on in lieu of a cruise ship, and what happens when the pirates take over makes righteous reading. But there's more. We learn that Fagin-like moneymen actually invest in these pirates for a cut of their haul, and Aubrey must deal with them, too. A classy read, with humor provided by a fellow passenger, a dirty-minded Englishwoman we don't see enough of. Know what "rumpy pumpy" means?

Aubrey Sentro, the heroine of this initially slow-moving thriller from Pyne (Fifty Mice), once did covert ops in the military, but she now does similar work for a private security firm in Bethesda, Md. Suffering from short-term memory loss from too many blows to the head, Sentro is in need of a vacation, and books a place on a cargo ship headed to South America along with a few other passengers. The pace picks up when pirates storm the ship, and Sentro uses her military training to fight back. Left for dead, she wakes to find the ship listing in a harbor and the crew and other passengers gone. On land, an unlikely trio offers help in her effort to rescue the missing passengers and crew: a 10-year-old boy with a vendetta against the pirate leader, a heroin-addicted American doctor, and the doctor's pregnant teenage girlfriend. Fortunately, Sentro's memory issues amount to senior moments and have little impact on her ability to battle bad guys. The complexity of her character makes up in part for the stock action. Fans of the action flicks will enjoy this. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. (Feb.)

An unusually active risk management agent sent home to rest embarks on a tropical cruise that drops her into hotter waters than ever. Everyone at Solomon Systems agrees that Aubrey Sentro needs a break after her dramatic rescue of kidnapped software exec Scott Chang, and they don't even know about her recent diagnosis with persistent post-concussion syndrome, which affects her memory in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Forced to use some of her accumulated vacation days, Sentro books passage aboard the Jeddah, a working steamer that carries a few passengers. Though she can't even remember most of their names from meal to meal, Sentro becomes unexpectedly close to outspoken Fontaine Fox just in time for heavily armed pirates to board the ship and terrorize passengers and crew alike. Despite their apparent amateurism, identical twins Pauly and Castor Zeme are no ordinary pirates: They're acting on behalf of someone who's after much more than the usual cash, credit cards, jewelry, and valuables. As Pyne keeps reminding you, however, Sentro is no ordinary victim either, and her reaction when the Jeddah is boarded sparks the first of many violent sequences so unforgettable that even she might end up remembering them. If only her adult children, Jeremy and Jennifer Troon, could be persuaded to stand down from involving themselves personally in the mercenaries' ransom demand, her story would end much more quietly--but what would be the fun in that? Pyne keeps expertly mixing up his pitches long after you've stopped expecting anything but blazing fastballs. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.