David Kent The Black Jack Conspiracy

The Black Jack Conspiracy

David Kent

Pocket, Dec 2005, $7.99, 400 pp.

ISBN: 0743497511

In Oklahoma, the police arrest Alex Bridge charging her with embezzling just under five-hundred million dollars from her employer, Cross Current Media. Not long afterward FBI Agent Wells, who was looking into the Bridge affair, is murdered. The evidence once again overwhelmingly points at Alex as the culprit.

The Department of the Thirty knows that the obvious is often too simple, as the powerful will abuse their muscle to blame a lesser person for their crimes. Two major incidents, including murder, seem out of place for the profile they have drawn of Alex, a recent widow expecting a child soon. Former Deputy US Marshal Faith Kelly is assigned to protect Alex, if she will testify about what she knows about her former boss' financial shenanigans. However, no Department Thirty Agent, used to the improbable as being genuine, were prepared for a conspiracy that ties into the 1893 murder of the Great Comanche Chief Tabananika at Anadarko, in the Oklahoma Territory, and the present most powerful people in DC.

Obviously conspiracy buffs will go wild over THE BLACK JACK CONSPIRACY and its predecessor DEPARTMENT THIRTY, but so will anyone who appreciates a strong thriller. The story line is action-packed, but the two key women make the improbability seem genuine. The audience will feel for the beleaguered seemingly guilty Alex, who, not long before the embezzlement accusation, was deserted by her spouse, and soon after that learned he was killed in St. Louis. Faith, who co-starred in the previous novel, is the heroine who unravels the spool to find the two impossibly connected end points of the thread. David Kent writes a fine tale that grips the audience from start to finish.

Harriet Klausner