Title: The China Conspiracy
Author: p. m. terrell
ISBN: 0-9728186-3-4
Publisher: Drake Valley Press
Genre: Suspense
Release Date: May 2003
Rating: 5 - Collector's Treasure
Sensual Rating: n/a
Word Count: 337

She's back and better than before! The China Conspiracy, p. m. terrell's second novel, rivals her first in terms of suspense, fun, and thought provocation that will leave readers wondering what really may have happened in the 2000 presidential election.

Kit Olsen, CIA analyst/programmer, has been promoted. Sort of. She's been re-assigned from her duties of routine program analysis to work within the highly secured inner sanctum known as "Customs." And it's not just any program, that Kit has been asked to decode. It's a twenty-year-old program written in Mandarin. Kit, who's been teamed with Chen Ling, the CIA's best programmer, is to interpret the code while Chen translates the language; nothing more, nothing less.

But life outside the steel-vaulted doors begins to take on a strange language of its own. She catches her husband, Frank, have an affair with his secretary; her boss, Joan, is kidnapped right before her eyes; another agent is killed; and, by some miracle, an unknown and unlikely third-party candidate has just cleaned house in Virginia's Governor's race.

Carter Leigh, veteran TV reporter, is granted the first interview with the governor-elect. But it isn't what happens on-camera that intrigues the consummate reporter. It's a statement about starving children in China that hits the incoming chief's hot button and raises the eyebrows of Carter and his cameraman, Bryce.

And that's all in the first forty pages!

As Kit tries to put the many pieces of her shattered like together, she determines that the program is a simple counting mechanism. After her son is kidnapped, she reluctantly teams up with Carter to determine just what the CIA is up to. With the imagery of hanging and pregnant chads dangling in the background, The China Conspiracy, will leave readers wondering what really happened in Florida in 2000 and who is, really, running our government. I had to keep reminding myself that "it's only fiction!"

The China Conspiracy is a well-written, smooth flowing, page-turner that is destined to become "the" beach read of the summer.

Reviewed by: Julie Failla Earhart