She wasn't supposed to be the dangerous one.
By day, Lana Harper is a cybersecurity consultant who can rip through a corporate firewall before her coffee cools. By night, she teaches Taekwondo to teenagers in a converted warehouse on Chicago's North Side. The most dangerous thing in her apartment, on any given Tuesday, is the cat.
Then a cream envelope shows up in her mail with no return address and her name in clean block letters. A man falls through her ceiling. And the older sister she lost fifteen years ago walks back into her life with a name, a plan, and a quiet, inherited grudge.
The grudge belonged, originally, to their mother. Their mother died in a kitchen in Wilmette in July of 2002, in front of her six-year-old daughter, in what the police filed as a tragic home invasion. Their mother, it turns out, was carrying a case the world has spent twenty-three years trying very hard not to finish.
Lana is going to finish it.
In nine days. Across three continents. With a laptop, a roundhouse kick, a tactical van, a deeply skeptical handler named Mr. Halloran, and a sister who has spent the last fifteen years becoming the kind of woman the rest of the world was supposed to be afraid of.
The man at the end of the trail sits at 17 Petrograd Embankment in St. Petersburg. He has spent two patient decades on the unhurried, careful end of a global criminal financial network. He is the most surprised man in his profession by the time the Harper sisters find him. He should not be. He has had twenty-three years to be ready. The women coming for him have had twenty-three years to be patient.
Accidental Assassin is a fast, sardonic, quietly devastating spy thriller about the long arithmetic of competent women, the patient unfairness of family silences, and the difference, in the end, between revenge and finishing the work.
For readers of Mick Herron, Lee Child, and Stieg Larsson.
For anyone who has ever inherited a silence and decided, at long last, to break it.
The Harper Sisters, Book One.
