Good Morning, Killer

A renegade FBI agent. Sounds like a contradiction in terms, and in fact to me it suggested that agent Ana Grey should not be in that organization.

There are many fictional detectives who become obsessed with learning the truth, and will cross any number of barriers to get there. I don't' find that admirable or endearing. There are also many detectives who can't open up, are unable to trust. I do understand and can usually relate to this trait. In Ana we have both.

While searching for the man who abducted, viciously beat, and raped a fifteen-year-old girl, Ana crosses lines that may weaken the investigation, an investigation that she shares with Malibu detective Andrew Berringer. Ana and Andrew are having an affair. Ana tells herself that show more she is just in it for the sex yet she talks to Andrew about moving in together.

There are contradictions in Ana's character that I couldn't resolve in my head. She cares for Andrew but when he says he prefers to keep the house that holds so many family memories for him, she dismisses his concern because she prefers her own apartment. She is a level-headed investigator but goes off the rails when her thoughts lead her to accusations of infidelity against Andrew. She behaves in a dangerous, absurd manner that threatens the safety of others.

Yet inside she is caring about little Juliana, the rape victim. I couldn't put it together, particularly because the caring moments are so few. Instead of taking us inside a deep conversation with Juliana, Smith glosses over it and later says Ana had many conversations, without letting us into any of them. I suspected that Smith really did not know how to express that caring.

She did know how to express how a special nurse talks to a rape victim, and I appreciated the time she took with that (the acknowledgments indicate that she explored this topic with others).

Overall, I found Ana vindictive, reckless, and thoughtless, and I don't feel the need to read any more in this series. show less

This one was more tightly focused on the case than it was on Ana’s personal life. Suddenly there is no mention of her grandfather, who we learn was not much of a loving parent. No wonder she has such awful relationships with men. It’s revealed that her grandfather actually murdered her father because he was Latino and not good enough to lick the boots of his daughter. He got rid of the body and his daughter basically served him the rest of her life. Ana was brought up by a tyrannical bigot.
No wonder she and Andrew are at odds. They both are control freaks. When he finds out that she learned something about one of his cases that could open it back up, but didn’t tell him right away, he freaks out on her. It’s the old argument show more that she belittled him somehow as a man and as a cop. If she had been male and done the same thing, Andrew would have just called her an asshole and let it drop. But no, because she’s a woman, this is a deliberate attack to undermine his authority and make him look bad.

It’s one of the little things that have gone wrong. Once, she had to pull rank and take the kidnapping case away from him. Same reaction. Oh my poor, poor little ego. Then she finds out that he’s been fooling around with one or possibly two other women. She breaks it off after following him in his patrol car, seeing a woman put her head in his lap, then nearly runs him off the road in a rage. Then she unwisely shows up at his favorite cop watering hole and demands the money he owes her. Bad scene. He follows her home and they fight. It gets physical. She panics and draws the gun. He doesn’t back off but closes in on her. She fires.

He is injured but manages to leave, tracking blood all over. In further panic, she cleans up the whole scene (apparently forgetting all about luminol!). Even in the hospital after going into a coma, he doesn’t give her up. Instead, it is the very same woman who told her about the 3rd woman who connects Ana to the shooting. She is arrested. The trial begins and it looks black.

Meanwhile she has been completely obsessed with Juliana. They talk late at night until early morning because the girl is afraid to sleep for the bad dreams. Ana learns that Juliana is not the norm, she’s an anomaly. He normally kills his victims, she got away and screwed up everything. Ana traces the suspect to a particular photographer who uses modeling gigs as bait to trap young girls. She leaves the custody of her ex-partner Mike (that intimate beginning goes nowhere, too) and goes after the killer. When she was arrested, she and another FBI agent were in the middle of a stake out and about two minutes away from a take down. The cops blew it by busting up right in the middle and arresting her. The suspect was alerted to them and the whole thing went to hell.

Now she wants to take him down herself because she found out he just took another girl. She tracks him and gets him with no shots fired. The girl is OK.

Then she has to go back for trial. She and Andrew meet to talk. They both anguish and rage and in the end she tells him that she knows he robbed the bank that was the case she knew had fresh evidence. It was a ski mask. They matched the DNA from the saliva on the mask to some from his toothbrush (still at her house). He robbed the bank to get the woman who told Ana about his affair’s some money because they denied her her dead husband’s cop pension because he died off duty rather than on. In the end, she is arrested too, but for the murder of her husband – Andrew killed him. He decides he’s going to tape record a statement to the effect that her shooting him was in self-defense. Then he commits suicide. The tape is presented at her trial and the charges dismissed.

It was pretty heavy, all told. Ana’s emotional state is highly unstable. I don’t think a person like her would get past the psyche exams for the FBI. show less

Ana Grey is an FBI Agent assigned to the kidnapping of a teenage girl. Ana is also having escalating problems with her cop boyfriend, Andrew Berringer. This is really two unconnected stories smashed into one book. I was interested in the kidnapping story and didn't care about the relationship drama.

FBI Agent, Ana Grey is in an abusive relationship with an LA police detective whose cases are overlapping. Ana is concerned and protective of a 15 yr old girl rape victim. After Ana learns that her boyfriend has been seeing another woman, she confronts him in a bar and demands the money she loaned him be returned. He's embarrassed in front of his friends and the arguement escalates and he follows her to her home. It gets physical and she shoots him, is suspended from the Bureau but keeps working the rape case.

Loved "North of Montana," but liked this one much, much less. The "Montana" Ana Grey has suddenly morphed into someone I didn't recognize: a weirdly inexplicable, impulsive, stupid person. This is an FBI agent??? Don't know if I'll finish the series.