The King's Ransom

The recovery agent series is fun with lots of tougne-in-cheek humor. The story moves along at a good clip and keeps the reader guessing.

What a good read. Snappy dialogue, interesting dimensional characters. Will continue to read the series should there be one. Happy I purchased the book!

This book is excellent.. like all of Janet Evanovich’s books. I loved this story. I’m happy to have more of her books and the premise of this series is interesting and keeps me reading/listening.Lorelei King is fun to listen to and is perfect t for these characters!

Janet Evanovich returns with the second novel in the Gabriela Rose series, The King’s Ransom. This global action-adventure and mystery story is full of suspense, some humor, kidnappings, and much more. Gabriela is an expert at recovering lost treasures, stolen heirlooms, and missing assets. She’s often hired in suspected insurance fraud cases as well as by individuals and companies. But her latest job is brought to her by her ex-husband Rafer Janes and his cousin, Harley Patch. As president of a large private bank, Harley invested a significant amount of money in insuring many of the world’s priceless artifacts at the urging of his board. But recently, those insured pieces have been stolen and there’s no paper trail of Harley being directed to make the risky investments. He’s been suspended and unless the assets can be recovered soon, he is likely to go to jail. Harley and Rafer insist on accompanying her as the investigation takes her from New York City to London to Cairo to Florida to Italy.Gabriela is reliable, curious, cool under pressure, weapons and martial arts trained, and driven to succeed. She has excellent reflexes and is tenacious. She also has an aptitude for searching and finding things and loves the thrill of exploring the unknown. Rafer owns a dive shop, tends to drink too much, and seems to lack ambition. While they still have a lot of chemistry, they also spend a lot of time bickering. Harley is social and great at chatting, but he’s not so great at thinking through the ramifications of his actions on a business level (such as insuring assets well beyond what the bank the cover if all are lost). Readers are also introduced to Ahmed El Ghaly working at the Egyptian embassy. Will he appear in future books?Full of humor and vividly written, this novel grabbed my attention quickly. The premise is great and the story is over-the-top adventure. There’s plenty of action, danger, murder, and suspense in the story, and we get a little more character depth for Gabriela and Rafer in this novel. They’re becoming more dynamic characters in this second novel in the series. Readers also see how far into the grey line Gabriela and Rafer are willing to go to save Harley. There are also some romantic sparks between Gabriela and Rafer and there’s chemistry with her and Ahmed. I liked the ending with a thread that could be developed for the next book in the series.Overall, this is an engaging, fast-paced, and entertaining action-adventure story full of murder, corruption, threats, kidnapping and a multi-layered global conspiracy. If you can just enjoy the over-the-top scenarios and not try to make them something more substantial, it’s an enjoyable read. Also, Gabriela is completely different from Stephanie Plum so readers should expect significant differences.Atria Books and Janet Evanovich provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own. The publication date is currently set for November 11, 2025.

In her typical fashion, Evanovich has created another book full of laughs, “suspense,” and wonderful characters. Really, really enjoyed it!