The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer

Genre:  Adult Detective

Stephenie Meyer's website

Amazon | Book Depository | Goodreads

Description (taken from Stephenie Meyer's website):

She used to work for the U.S. government, but very few people ever knew that. An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn’t even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning.

Now she rarely stays in the same place or uses the same name for long. They’ve killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon.

When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it’s her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers. To her horror, the information she acquires only makes her situation more dangerous.

Resolving to meet the threat head-on, she prepares for the toughest fight of her life but finds herself falling for a man who can only complicate her likelihood of survival. As she sees her choices being rapidly whittled down, she must apply her unique talents in ways she never dreamed of.

I feel like I need to admit that I was a Twilight fan.  Nevermind the fact that there may have been flaws.  In my teenage mind, those books were golden.  So of course when I found out there was another Stephenie Meyer book out there, I had to pick it up and see if I still held onto some pieces of my teenage mind.

Alex is on the run from a super-secret agency that helped get rid of terrorists and other threats.  She was a specialist who helped break people in interrogations using chemical warfare instead of physical warfare.  But the agency that employed her decided to permanently cut her loose and messed up.  So she's spent years on the run trying to figure out what happened.  Then a peace offering comes up:  one more interrogation in exchange for her life.  But when she meets the man to interrogate, not everything adds up correctly.  Sometimes, things sound too good to be real.

Let me just point out one glaring flaw in this whole novel.  I'm warning you now that I'm giving a spoiler.  Change the page if you don't want this...  Who on earth decides to fall in love with their torturer?  It's worse than Stockholm syndrome...  Now that I've got that off my chest, this book was easy to fall into.  Sure, it was a really big book, but it flowed well.  And the characters caught my attention.  Minus the initial flaw, I was sold.  But it did kind of feel like a cheap romance novel thrown into an intense detective situation.  But I guess, who cares?

Meh...  Some people are going to love it.  And some people are going to hate it.  Onto the next one.