Between The Lines

The Trigger: An Agent Dallas Thriller 

Author: L J Sellers

Published: August 2013 by Spellbinder Press

Category: Crime/Thriller

"Agent Jamie Dallas loves undercover assignments that get her out of the Phoenix Bureau. But when a woman and her baby disappear from an isolated community of preppers in Northern California, she knows the risk of infiltrating the armed group is dangerously high.

Once inside the compound, she discovers that the brothers who founded Destiny are scheming something far more devious than kidnapping or murder. Meanwhile, her local FBI contact, Agent McCullen, is pulled from her team and assigned to investigate the murder of a woman with phony ID, found at the bottom of a motel pool."

FBI Agent Jamie Dallas was first introduced in LJ Sellers’ Detective Jackson series and she’s proved to be an interesting and likeable, if complex, character. She’s smart, good at her job and likes living dangerously. Young and unattached, yet Dallas has issues stemming from her childhood which limit her ability and her wish to sustain relationships. She likes to move on when things start getting anything like serious. On the other hand those same issues mean she’s very good at playing a part, being someone else, which helps enormously with her undercover work. It’ll be interesting to see how her character develops, I think there may be a lot of personal challenges as well as job related ones in future stories.

Restless and desperately wanting an undercover assignment, Dallas prefers to move around and enjoys taking on a new persona to work a case. She soon gets her wish when she’s selected to access a survivalist community planning for a post apocalyptic world and gain their trust and confidence. What starts out as a missing persons search rapidly turns into a far more dangerous and sinister case. It’s frightening to see how much chaos and destruction a hacker could cause, not to mention self-serving, irrational and unbalanced individuals intent on bringing about their own vision of the future. It made me think about scenarios I hadn’t even imagined.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, it’s a good start to a new series and the hints dropped about Dallas’ past have left the field wide open and I’m interested to learn more about her as a person.