Fabulous Fiction Firsts #251

Sat, 04/02/2011 - 4:08pm by muffy

Taylor Stevens' s "blazingly brilliant debut" The Informationist * * is perhaps the best thriller I've read in a long while, introducing at the same time a new action heroine, who is a worthy successor to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander.

Androgynous and beautiful, possessing an encyclopedic and logical mind, Vanessa Michael Munroe deals in information - very expensive information that corporations and the CIA are more than willing to pay for. Now a Texas oil billionaire has hired her to find his daughter who vanished in Africa four years ago. Born to missionary parents in lawless central Africa, Munroe took up with an infamous gunrunner when she was just fourteen. After almost a decade building a new life and lucrative career, Munroe finds herself back in the lands of her childhood, betrayed, cut off from civilization, and left for dead.

"Gripping, ingenious, and impeccably paced" . You don't get any better than this.

The author herself is as unusual as her protagonist. Born into the Children of God, raised in communes across the globe, denied an education beyond the sixth grade, Taylor Stevens broke free of the cult in her late 20s. With no marketable skills and a family to support, she began writing in earnest after reading a Robert Ludlum. Here is an interview with Stevens in the latest Vogue Magazine. She is at work on the 3rd title in the series.

* * = starred reviews