Original Sin: A Sally Sin Adventure

Retired spy Lucy Hamilton, currently a San Francisco stay-at-home mom, proves herself to be "a fabulous multitasker," capable of both playing cowboys with her three-year-old son and tangling with international terrorists, in McMullen's diverting debut. When Simon Still, her former boss at the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction, calls Lucy back to active duty, Lucy is trying hard to forget a career that her husband knows nothing about and succeeding%E2%80%94except when she slips up and accidentally decks her yoga instructor or Simon's assignment stirs long-buried memories. That's when overlong passages of backstory put the brakes on the tenuous momentum of a plot about the return of Lucy's old nemesis, Ian Blackford, long thought to be dead. Blackford's sudden reappearance offers Simon a perfect opportunity to use Lucy (formerly known as Sally Sin) as bait. What no one anticipates is the fury of a mother's protective instinct in this promising light thriller. (July)