Anna Blundy, Breaking Faith

London's Chronicle reporter Faith Zanetti is unhappy with her latest assignment that she assumes is gonna go nowhere as the Cairnbridge plane bombing that killed all 245 aboard has been covered to incredible lengths over the twenty-five years with nothing new. She assumes in between her booze that she will bring nothing new too.

Faith goes to Italy to spend time with Eden, her former boyfriend and father of her infant. He likes Italy and seems to want to remain there; she just wants to finish her story and get back to real investigative journalism like she did in Moscow (see VODKA NEAT) although the incidents there still haunt her. Eden introduces Faith to Phoebe and Walter Irving, friends of her late father Karel, who also was a reporter allegedly killed while covering the Troubles in North Ireland. Faith begins receiving warnings from the grave that leads the intrepid reporter to realize Phoebe knew her dad intimately and the couple knows who made that call in Reykjavik to the American Embassy in Iceland just prior to the Cairnbridge bombing. She also learns about one particular female traveler who died on that tragic plane; a person she would have liked to have met.

With an obvious connection to the Lockerbie tragedy, BREAKING FAITH is a super journalistic investigative thriller as the heroine is stunned with revelation after revelation on a story that she expected to go nowhere. Faith makes the tale work as a tough individual who can out drink just about anyone while balancing a baby with her investigations. Faith's inquiry into the Cairnbridge plane bombing is deftly handled as Anna Blundy provides another winner that readers will toast with Chianti: wine.

Harriet Klausner