An assignment with a Milan fashion house leads Finn to an undercover investigation of a train wreck in Croatia—scene of her most tragic professional mistake and home to terrorists still out for revenge. The hunter becomes the hunted and the stakes skyrocket as Finn must win a race against the clock to stop the spread of a deadly African pandemic and escape with her life. 

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Fake’ was an entertaining corporate spy mystery mostly set, despite the picture of Dubrovnik on the cover, in Zadar and Zagreb in Croatia. It was the start of a series, establishing the character of Finn Teller. I enjoyed the intercutting of Finn’s life-changing backstory in Croatia a decade earlier with her present-day investigation. It was fast, action-packed, made good use of the locations and only asked me to suspend my disbelief a little to add to the excitement. I’ve already bought ‘Exit‘ the next book in the series.

I enjoyed Twist Phelan’s story ‘The Fourteenth Juror’ in Lee Child’s short story collection ‘Vengeance’, so I bought ‘Fake’, the first book in her five-book series about corporate spy Finn Teller. 

Twist Phelan had Finn Teller hit the ground running. In the first ten per cent of the book, Finn thwarts a cunning haute couture fraud plot, takes down a bad guy in hand-to-hand combat, and meets in glamorous locations in Paris and Milan.

Then, having established Finn as tough, competent, independent and eager for action, Twist Phelan has her refusing to accept an assignment from a prestigious client because it means that she’ll have to go to Croatia – a place she has a history with that she’s not proud of and where her return will put her life at risk.

Of course, Finn lets herself be pressured into accepting the assignment, and the story then cross-cuts between her current corporate spy assignment and her CIA assignment a decade earlier. I admired this structure. It built Finn’s character, added to the tension through a slow reveal, made the plot more complicated, gave some background on Croatia’s far-from-untroubled recent history and gave Finn two puzzles to solve.

This worked well for me as an engaging adventure wrapped around a mystery with a main character who wasn’t straight from Central Casting. It made good use of its industrial and geographic settings and, while Finn’s survival sometimes relied on exceptional good luck, it never reached the ‘You have to be kidding me’ level of the Mission Impossible movies. 

I’m looking forward to her next book, ‘Exit’, where she’s working with the Prime Minister of Greece on an abduction case.

---