When Sophie Medina arrives home to the London cottage she shares with her husband after a photojournalism assignment, her husband is missing. More than just missing, her husband has disappeared with his blood on the ground and a bedspread missing in Multiple Exposure by Ellen Crosby. Sophie knows that her husband was part of the CIA, and she fears that his hidden life is part of why he was kidnapped and potentially killed, but after months, there are no answers.
She quits her job traveling the world taking photos in some of the world’s most dangerous locations and moves back to Washington, DC where she hopes to be able to regroup. She takes on a job as a photographer working for Luke Santangelo and Focus Photography, thanks to a contact her old boss had given her. Her new job involves taking photos of events around DC, something Luke isn’t sure is the right gig for her.
The first event is a museum exhibit featuring two Faberge eggs being displayed for the first time by Arkady Vasiliev, a Russian oil magnate that Sophie’s husband had known slightly through business. In fact, her husband had actually seen the eggs at a party Vasiliev had hosted in London before he’d been kidnapped, though Sophie had been out of town at the time. Vasiliev is already highly paranoid and becomes only more suspicious that Sophie is added to the event at a late date.
Small signs start to appear that maybe Sophie’s husband hasn’t been kidnapped and he isn’t dead. In fact, the CIA now believes that he has been selling oil secrets from his day job where they recently had discovered a new soon to be lucrative oil field in the hinterlands of Russia. Vasiliev believes the same and threatens Sophie wanting documents from the testing done, assuming that her husband has them and that he’s been in contact with Sophie.
People start dying, and attempts are made on Sophie’s life where it becomes more and more obvious that something is going on. Sophie can’t even tell her closest friends about her husband’s double life, but she needs someone to turn to. As Sophie races not just to stay alive but clear her name, more and more complications appear.
I enjoyed the novel. Yes, I had figured it out by the end, but it wasn’t a huge obvious villain with every clue pointing that way through the whole book, nor was it such a shock that you are annoyed at having been led astray for two hundred pages. I enjoyed Sophie as the main character, and some of the others in the book were a hoot from Ali the assistant at Focus Photography to her best friend Grace to her stepfather Harry.
It was a nice, light read that I got through in a day dedicated to reading – and I didn’t want to put it down every chapter or so and go do something else. I was intrigued and ready to see what came next. The cover intimates that this won’t be the only Sophie Medina novel, and when the next one comes out, I’ll definitely pick it up to read.
Written by Michelle who always thought she’d make a great spy and that the CIA should have recruited her. She’s rethinking that idea now. See else she’s rethinking on her blog Honest & Truly! and via Twitter where she is also @HonestAndTruly.