"Blind Instinct" by Fiona Brand

Sara Fischer is a librarian who discovers a Nazi codebook in her late father's attic. This coincides with the return of dreams in which she was Sara Weiss, a spy for the French Resistance. These memories of her past life enable her to unravel the code and inadvertently puts her life in danger. Also involved is childhood friend and unrequited love Marc Bayard, who works for National Intelligence. He's still tracking down Alex Lopez, head of a brutal cartel that is in a war with a Nazi-based cabal over diamonds looted from a sunken ship, the sinking of which involved some sort of murder cover-up.

I think.

To be honest, I had no idea what the hell was going on in this book. It wasn't until I hopped onto the Internet and did a little research that I discovered this was book number three in a trilogy! However, absolutely nowhere on the cover, or on the back-cover blurb did it mention this book was part of a trilogy. No, you have to flick through the book and read the author's acknowledgements to get any sort of idea that two books came before this one. Pretty shifty, considering the asking price for this thing is $15.95! I can't really complain because I bought it for $2 from an op shop. Nevertheless, tactics like this to sell more books really tick me off. I was expecting a fairly brainless romantic action thriller. Instead, I kept getting tons and tons and tons of complicated back-story dumped on me.

Ironically enough, this is what scores the book points. "Blind Instinct" isn't some by-the-numbers romantic thriller churned out by an author operating on autopilot. It's a reasonably complex conclusion to what is obviously a well-researched thriller series. I'm not sure I was intrigued enough to hunt down the previous two books (I know how it all ends, after all), but "Blind Instinct" shows off an author with a little talent to spare. And - despite having trouble following events - I read it all the way to the end. That's REALLY saying something.