Review: The Secret Seven (Emily Slate #7) by Alex Sigmore

                                                            

Print Length: 258 pages

Publisher: Eric Warren Author, LLC (January 15, 2023) 

From Goodreads.com: It’s All Come Down to This…

Following the massive revelations about her family and the Organization that killed her husband, Special Agent Emily Slate had hoped she was finally on the right track to take them all down and finally find the answers she needed.

But due to the fallout from her actions regarding the same Organization, Emily has been relegated back to desk duty, and is given a new she’s being transferred to a new office and will need to start all over again.

Fortunately, before her transfer goes through, a new case comes in, one that’s suited to her particular talents. A teenage boy has been brutally murdered, mutilated and staged, and Emily’s new boss wants her to take a look before she’s sent off somewhere else.

Except, when Emily dives into the details of the case, nothing seems to make sense. The evidence isn’t lining up, and she can’t make heads nor tails of who could have done this. All she knows is, if she doesn’t do everything she can to solve this case, she’ll be forced to move and leave everything and everyone she loves behind.

It’s only when she makes a startling revelation that Emily realizes the true motives behind this heinous crime. And they will wreck her to her core. She will find herself alone with the greatest threat she’s ever faced. And there’s no guarantee she’ll make it out alive.

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My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

As excited as I was for the over-reaching arc of "the organization" to be solved in this seventh book, the story was just entirely way too far-fetched for me. 

Trust me, I completely understand that some people have the ability to infiltrate organizations, and sometimes obtain high-ranking positions within those positions, but to orchestrate an entire event such as this one for the whole purpose of having a face-to-face conversation with Emily before staging her death is a little too extreme. 

It seems to me it would have been simpler to have the face-to-face inside of her home (since we know how easy it is to get inside apparently), and then stage a break-in gone wrong. Or sent her an email, and while she was distracted reading it taken her out and made it look like an accident of some sort (or that she had killed herself).

Although for the life of me I don't know why the head person in charge even bothered giving her the answers she wanted when it seems the easiest solution would have been to wait for her transfer, then send the assassin there to quietly take her out (while she was on the way would have been even better, she could have ended up just another missing person). But then, I suppose the series would be over and people who are fans of Emily would have been in an uproar. 

Another thing I noticed is that the new SAC (Wallace) is absolutely right in his assessment of Emily. She IS obsessed with dismantling "the organization" (and I'm not saying that is a bad thing as I completely understand her motivation), but when she openly admits that she didn't do her research on her half of a potential suspect list because she was too busy going through information she had gathered just proves that at the very least she should have been taken off-duty for awhile. 

As it is, I'm curious as to where the author plans to take this story next (especially with the cliff-hanger this one ended on), but I'm going to need to take a break and read some other stuff before I come back to this series.