A Game Of Chance (Mass Market Paperback)

I think Game of Chance is an especially good Linda Howard story. Meet Sunny Miller. She has had a very tough life. She is living on her own with no relatives or even friends. Her mother is dead, and she has only one person in her life that she contacts by cell phone for a couple of minutes a week. She has never had the luxury of settling down or trusting anyone. She can't afford trust, her father is a world renown terrorist and looking for her. To keep from staying in one location, Sunny has a job as a courier, delivering packages (for very important clients) from one location to another. During one of Sunny's deliveries, she is robbed. Due to the nature of the job, Sunny is investigated and comes to the attention of CIA agent Chance MacKenzie. Chance is a top agent in his field and thinks Sunny is working with her father. The plan is to meet her and to either have her learn to trust him enough to divulge her secrets or spend enough time with her that she will make a mistake so the CIA can catch both her and her father.

Take one very wounded heroine afraid to trust, throw in a CIA agent who has his own set of trust issues (even though he is attracted to Sunny), and you have the basic plot of this book. It's simple, it's straight forward, it works. You have an empathy for the character of Sunny and all that she goes through. Quick read; good story; I would recommend.

Aside from that, A Game of Chance was a great book. I assume it would have been a lot better had I read the books following up to this, but nonetheless a great read.

In my honest opinion, I think that the book ended too quick. I think LH spent so much time with the rest of the story and then hurried to finish it up. Maybe it's because there's going to be a book following it, maybe not - either way, I wasn't ready for it to end. I felt like I needed more explanation from both Chance and Sunny.

Despite everything else, I really enjoyed this novel. Linda Howard is quickly becoming my favorite author, and I think it's safe to assume that she can't write a bad book. It always works out to her advantage in the end.