No One Lives Twice - Julie Moffet
If you listen to the news at all, you probably know that women are underrepresented in the tech sector (not to mention often subjected to unpleasant working environments). In the literary world, however, a few “geek girls” have made their appearance. One that recently came across my e-reader was Lexi Carmichael, whose first adventure was 2010’s No One Lives Twice.
Lexi, who works for the NSA, first realizes she’s embroiled in something strange when not one but two suspicious dudes demand that she fork over the papers her best friend Basia sent her. "What papers?" she wonders... Well, it turns out that Basia had sent her the papers, she just hadn’t gotten ‘em yet. But all the papers are is a generic contract with a little coded message at the bottom of one page, the word “Acheron” in a simplistic code. Which, of course, geeky Lexi figures out immediately.
Those papers start Lexi on a hunt for Basia and her Polish-born cousin that will take her across the Atlantic and force her boyish (i.e., flat-chested) body up against those of not one, not two, but three different hotties.Yeah, sure – and the secret unwinds into some strange plot involving terrorists, clones, surrogates, and spies. But, of course, Lexi manages to pull it all off without breaking a fingernail…
No One Lives Twice is the first of nine (to date) Lexi Carmichael adventures from the pen of Julie Moffett. It’s cataloged (by my library, anyway) as a mystery. Some installments in the series are also cataloged as “romance.” Moffett’s also author of “historical paranormal romances” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and what appears to be fantasy.
Frankly, Julie should stick to fantasy and paranormal romance, because her alleged “geek girl” is about as geeky as Smurfette. Not only does this 20-something not know how to operate a cell phone, she has to have friends do all her hacking for her. Oh, sure, she solves a simple cipher – a=1, b=2, c=3… – and generates a completely undocumented “formula” somewhere near the end of the book, but to call Carmichael a “geek” is an insult to geekdom everywhere.
Moffett’s not much better at her job than Carmichael, for that matter. For instance, she seems to think that the fetus borne by a surrogate mother contains some of her genetic material. For another, she thinks that the aftershave Hai Karate is “high karate” and that it was available when Lexi was a kid, back in the early ‘90s (it went out of production in the early ‘80s). Oh, yeah, and Julie? MI-6 is the British version of the CIA: it’s pretty unlikely that they’d recruit an Irishman as an agent… just like the CIA probably wouldn’t recruit a Brit.
More than anything else, however, the plot reads like a ripoff of Janet Evanovitch’s Stephanie Plum, with Carmichael’s blood pressure being repeatedly raised by the appearance of gorgeous men who lust after her skinny body (36A, in case you were curious). Yeah; that’s just what wannabe geek girls want: a bunch of hot men who’ll do all the work for them while they try on thongs.
Duh.
copyright © 2017 scmrak
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