‘Did you think you'd be any safer here, Fox? Did you think anybody was going to stand up for you when they never did before?’
In the sweating heat of Louisiana, former Special Forces soldier turned bodyguard, Charlie Fox, faces her toughest challenge yet.
Professionally, she’s at the top of her game, but her personal life is in ruins. Her lover, bodyguard Sean Meyer, has woken from a gunshot-induced coma with his memory in tatters. It seems that piecing back together their relationship is proving harder for him than relearning the intricacies of the close-protection business.
Working with Sean again was never going to be easy for Charlie, either, but a celebrity fundraising event in aid of still-ravaged areas of New Orleans should have been the ideal opportunity for them both to take things nice and slow.
Until, that is, they are thrust into the middle of a war zone.
When an ambitious robbery explodes into a deadly hostage situation, the motive may be far more complex than simple greed. Somebody has a major score to settle, and Sean is part of the reason. Only trouble is, he doesn’t remember why.
And when Charlie finds herself facing a nightmare from her own past, she realises she can’t rely on Sean to watch her back. This time, she’s got to fight it out on her own.
One thing’s for sure − no matter how overwhelming the odds stacked against her, Charlie Fox is never going to die easy . . .
‘Zoë Sharp is one of the sharpest, coolest, and most intriguing writers I know. She delivers dramatic, action-packed novels, with characters we really care about. And once again, in DIE EASY, Zoë Sharp is at the top of her game.’ New York Times best-selling author, Harlan Coben.
‘Ill-tempered, aggressive and borderline psychotic, (Charlie) Fox is also compassionate, introspective and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic − and coolest − heroines in contemporary genre fiction.’ Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune.
‘I’d give anything to have a character of mine described in the way Zoë Sharp’s Charlie Fox, a former special-forces operative and present-day freelance lethal weapon, is described in the critical excerpt above. It’s high praise and it implies the complexity of what Sharp achieves. If I were asked to characterize her writing in a single adjective the one I’d choose would probably be “cool.” In a world where lots of people act cool, Zoë Sharp’s books are cool.
‘But as the review implies, they’re not only cool. They’re razor sharp, deeply felt, and heartbreakingly immediate. These are action thrillers about a woman who works as a bodyguard, frequently trying to protect women, and there’s no cheapening the central issue of violence (often against women) as a means to an end. In fact, by wrapping this societal cancer in noirish, kickass, often funny thrillers, written in coolly polished prose, Sharp can take societal violence farther and hit it harder than many so-called literary writers. And do it in language that’s almost poetic in its economy and impact.
‘Zoë Sharp is one of the writers whose books I open with a bit of reluctance in case the new one isn’t up to the earlier ones, because they’re that good. And Fox’s attitude is contagious. When a writer can get The New York Times to say, “The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant,” she’s doing something very, very right.’ Edgar-nominee Timothy Hallinan, in his introduction to MAKING STORY: Twenty-One Writers on How They Plot.