Title: The Ultimatum
Author: Karen Robards
Series: The Guardian #1
The end is worth the beginning
Publicly, Bianca St. Ives runs a successful security firm with her father. Privately, she’s part of her father’s team of thieves, stealing back money or other goods from the thieves that had stolen them first. The operation involving two hundred million dollars in a secret safe beneath the palace of an Arabic prince is merely par for the course—until Bianca discovers the money gone. They’d been played, and she has to figure out who had taken the money and set them up to take the fall.
The first half is a trudge. Exciting things happen, but not quickly. Every thought that crosses Bianca’s mind and every slightest move she makes was accompanied by paragraphs and paragraphs of exposition, slowly but thoroughly giving us the where’s, why’s, and how’s of the plot to the present moment. Chapters two through eight all take place within about half an hour in the book’s time. Seven chapters to describe thirty minutes.
The middle was not necessarily slower but much less exciting as we find out how the team had fared after the botched job and get a glimpse of Bianca’s day-to-day life, including meeting the people close to her. This is only book one of a series, so there were a LOT of loose ends left dangling off a cliff in Austria. One of those ends is the point and purpose of introducing us to her friends Evie and Hay and telling us all about their drama. Maybe they’ll be important later in the series, but they served no purpose whatsoever in this installment.
The pace does pick up in the second half when Bianca plans another heist. Every minute thought and action is still described, but we’re already up to speed on the history and know as much as Bianca does, so there’s none of that exposition bogging down the action. The second half is so fascinating and entertaining that I want to read it again already.
At first, I really didn’t like Bianca. She was perfect in every way—beautiful, smart, talented, athletic, rich—and she had the skills to get herself out of trouble. Everything seemed to work out fine for her, and for a while I thought she was a major Mary Sue. But then things started going wrong for her, and she wasn’t always able to get herself out of trouble—and we find out she was intentionally perfect. And you know what they say about appearances…she had looks, she had brains, she had money and opportunity…but in her own words, she was always on the outside looking in. I realized she had everything, and yet she had nothing, and that was when I fell in love with her as a character.
I won’t talk about any of the other characters because I don’t want to give anything away. I highly recommend going into this story knowing as few spoilers as possible. I had no idea—for some reason, I was under the impression that this was going to be paranormal somehow; that’s a big no—and, though I’m a fan of spoilers, I really feel I was more invested in the story because I had no idea what to expect.
I noted a couple other things that bothered me, insignificant really. And, now that I think about it, all from the first chapter. I guess it was a good effort at creating the loopholed circumstances that allowed the present-day plot to happen as it did. If one thing in that chapter had been different, the whole book would have been.
One, I can’t buy that the girl and her mom heard the Shadow’s footsteps outside on the gravel, who knows at what distance. Had to be several yards at least. I live on gravel, and when I’m in the house I can usually hear a car drive up, but only if there is silence in the house (such as when I’m reading). I’ve never heard footsteps on my gravel drive from inside any house, however silent. And the mother was reading aloud, so while they might have heard the car they were expecting, they wouldn’t have heard footsteps. Unless the window was open and facing the drive, and I know it wasn’t, because the mom had the house shut up tight, and it was said the bedroom was in the back of the house.
Also, I can’t buy that the girl survived a bomb blast because she was inside a metal cabinet. (All I can think of is the fourth Indiana Jones movie, when Harrison Ford survived a nuclear blast by getting in a refrigerator.) Possible or not, it’s a stretch. I figure if the blast was strong enough that it hurled the cabinet out of the house and off into the woods, it was strong enough to kill her one way or the other.
Lastly, what was up with the moniker “the Shadow”? It was used in the first chapter and never again. I think it was just how the girl thought of the attacker, what she called him in her mind, or perhaps that was what her mother or father had called the threat when explaining why they moved so much. If that’s the case, it wasn’t explained very well, and if that’s not the case, and there’s a reason for it, it must be something we’ll learn about later.
If you find the first half slow, hold out for everything that goes down in the Allied Industries offices. That’s my favorite part of the whole book, and I have several favorite parts.
Overall, I’ve been waiting anxiously to see what Robards would put out next, and by the end of this book I found myself solidly on board and cannot wait for the second installment, The Moscow Deception, due out in 2018.
