Against Their Will, Karina Kilmore

AGAINST THEIR WILL opens with a bang, and keeps up the pace, tension and jeopardy right to the very last page. Centred around Danny Boyd, a journalist who had been recruited to work for "The Open", a covert investigative unit hunting the world's worst criminal networks, she's very close to a breakthrough on a child abuse, trafficking ring known as Kronos, when her cover is spectacularly blown, and her future exploded before her eyes.

Forced to moonlight as a PI whilst lying low close to home in the US, she's assigned to the case of an Ohio family who have major problems after the death of the patriarch who was shot to death in what appears to have been a botched robbery. The reading of his will opens multiple cans of worms, and Boyd is tasked to find out the truth about an unknown son, revealing a hell of a lot more about a really screwed up family and just what vicious man the not much mourned Bob Wilson was along the way.

Meanwhile Boyd is completely incapable of stepping away from the Kronos investigation, torturing herself watching video's of children, looking for clues, working on setting up a major sting, bringing up a lot of guilty memories from when she was a child. She's also being watched - it's hard to tell if it's Kronos or something to do with the Wilson case, but the threats get very close and dangerous quickly, and Boyd ends up in a race to reveal truths about the Wilson's, and Kronos, before it's too late.

AGAINST THEIR WILL turned into a couple of sittings read, which seems wrong with the subject matter being so flat out awful. The Kronos trafficking ring is handled sensitively and cautiously but there is absolutely no getting away from the thought that kids are being trafficked into horrendous circumstances to this day, and ... what the hell is wrong with people. Mind you, families like the Wilson's make you wonder ... what the hell is wrong with people as well. Bob Wilson is one of those characters that is unmournable (not a word I know), a representative of the sort of reprehensible human being that the world could do without.

Balanced against the awful there are some really admirable characters in this outing as well - Danny Boyd is ruthless, talented and determined, beside her is the now disabled wife of Bob Wilson who, despite being in a wheelchair without speech, turns out to be the sort of strong female character that makes you feel better about the world. The story in AGAINST THEIR WILL is very much a rollercoaster - one where you could quite easily despair of the world and the disgusting behaviour of people, and one that makes you realise that there are some good ones out there - long may they conquer.