#All her little secrets professional

And what better device for spreading the dust-sized chips in the billions than to disperse them from his luxury airship the Condor? It’s as big as an ocean liner and lifts with helium, so no fair comparing it to the hydrogen-hindered Hindenburg. So now that Colon has successfully tested the weapon on individuals, he’s ready to go big time. And if you’re told to kill your friends, you’ll kill them if you can. If you get jabbed with this, your brain imprints and blindly obeys the first voice you hear. He and his henchmen have injected the Heron’s crew with tiny microchips, electromagnetic sensors half the size of an average grain of pollen. The guy’s a bad dude with a serious grudge against the United States. The crazies are victims of Martin Colon, formerly of Cuban Intelligence and now VP of Ostrom Airship Corporation.

The ship at first appears to be empty, but once the rescuers explore inside, a group of crazed men attacks them. There, the National Underwater and Marine Agency training ship Edison responds to a mayday call from the MV Heron saying that they're under attack. Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala “find trouble the way a prize bloodhound finds a scent,” and this time they find it in the seas near Nassau. Vera, once a fierce defender of children and women, is now a dementia patient in a nursing home, and Morris skillfully paints the loving, painful relationship between her and Ellice.Ĭorporate competition is not only racist and sexist, but deadly in this confident debut thriller.ĭanger abounds in the 20th ocean adventure in Cussler’s NUMA Files series. One of Ellice’s secrets is Vera Henderson, the woman who raised her and her brother, Sam. She also provides a knowledgeable portrait of Atlanta’s complex social structure. Morris builds an escalating thriller plot packed with convincing details about corporate politics and skulduggery. At the same time, her own secrets are being revealed. The harder she looks into what really happened to Michael, the more she uncovers in the company that alarms her. But she feels distinctly unwelcome on the board despite the support of company CEO Nate Ashe, a somewhat dotty Southern gentleman. Houghton has been under pressure about its lack of employee diversity, and her hiring should improve their optics. Among its least expected effects: She’s promoted to his job as head of legal, which puts her on the board of a family-owned, almost entirely White corporation. Ellice had no delusions about being in love with Michael-it was a colleagues-with-benefits situation for a woman focused more on her career than her personal life-but his death blows up her entire life. When he summons her for an early-morning meeting and she arrives at his office to find him dead, an apparent suicide, she keeps that a secret, too, leaving his body to be discovered by someone else. She has secrets in the present, too, notably her long-term affair with Michael Sayles, who is married, White, and her boss in Houghton Transportation’s legal department. To rise, Ellice has carefully shaped her image-and left out certain pieces of her past, like her childhood in a small, grindingly poor Georgia town where some very bad things happened before she escaped via a scholarship to an elite boarding school. As a Black woman, she’s dealt with barriers other lawyers haven’t, especially in Atlanta, a city that, despite its vibrant and diverse present, hasn’t shed its racist history.

Success hasn’t been easy for Ellice Littlejohn.

#All her little secrets professional

A seat on the executive board should be a professional peak for a corporate lawyer.