Assassins in Love

DeLake (Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s newest pseudonym) takes readers on a fast ride with this passionate futuristic tale, the first in a series. Idiosyncratic entrepreneur Rikki Bastogne and straitlaced Mikael “Misha” Yurinovich Orlinski are both assassins in a distant future where killing for cause is often legal. Responsible practitioners join the highly regulated Assassins Guild, which Misha venerates and Rikki despises. Misha hires Rikki to do a job in the hopes of recruiting the indie killer, and when they meet while Rikki is disposing of the target’s body, their chemistry is immediate and explosive. At first Rikki is unaware of Misha’s true identity, and when she learns it, she is shaken to the core: for years, Rikki has believed that Misha helped his mother kill Rikki’s father in cold blood. How he proves her wrong—and how the two eventually learn to work together to combat a threat which could destroy them both—makes for a compelling, hot, and believable tale. (Mar.)