Review: Part 2 - Red Herrings Galore
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 5, 2011
Wallbanger is the second installment of the Lizzie Baldwin thriller series and a continuation of 'Shaken and Stirred'. In this story we learn that Xander is some kind of arms dealer, and had been in the middle of a deal to acquire a nuke called the Harvey, when the person with whom he was dealing with was murdered.Let me say right off the bat that reading Wallbanger before reading Shaken and Stirred is a no-no. There is way too much going on in Wallbanger to fully appreciate if you hadn't read Shaken and Stirred, and I have a feeling what happened in that first book will be integral to what occurs in the third installment 'Sake Bomb'.Yes, you read correctly, there is a third installment, which I must say ticks me off royally. Not because we have yet another cliffhanger for which there is no conclusion until 2012, but because neither the author nor the editor/publisher/distributor bothered to tell us that  up front. I think it should be my decision whether or not I want to get bogged down in what is essentially a miniseries. Tell us ahead of time that each story/book/installment is incomplete. Here's the other kicker, I have no idea if Sake Bomb is the final installment or if I'll be forced to invest more money into finding out exactly what happens. I deducted 1 star for that. I would have deducted 2 stars had the story not been so well written.Xander gets Lizzie to help him find the Harvey and in exchange he'll give her everything he has on formula 3-19 and she goes undercover as his sub.In this installment Bill Connolly (Lizzie's boss) finds out that Lizzie has gone rogue, but he has his own secrets and may or may not be leading a double life himself. Lizzie's partners, Jack and Gale, are having some sort of weird long term affair, Gale may or may not be a mole, Jack is busy digging into what Lizzie is up to, and then yet another of Lizzie's partners was seen sneaking around in her home; very odd since none of them are supposed to know what where each other lives. Oh, and whatever Bill is up to on the sly, he's being blackmailed for by a mystery woman.Sacha, the resident coke addict, psychopathic sadist/murderer, who claimed to have the Harvey, in fact did not, and two of his submissives turned out to be anything but what we expected them to be.I have to give it to this author, not only is her writing excellent, but there are so many red herrings it's impossible to know what's going on, who's working for whom, and who are in fact the good guys, the bad guys, and the victims. Every other page delivers something unexpected and someone doing something they shouldn't. It would be easy, with so many curveballs for the story to be disjointed, muddled, and confusing, but it isn't. And for the most part it reads like more like a whodunit than just a cheesy 007 knock off which I expected it to be.