Barbara Lloyd McMichael

"Bulletproof Mascara" - Bethany Maines

Atria - 394 pages - $15



So maybe majoring in linguistics wasn't the smartest career move. Nikki Lanier has been out in the real world for a couple of years, bouncing from job to job. But in this economy, she finds herself unemployed and back in Tacoma, living with her mother. She is desperate to find a way out.

Nikki is the redheaded, 26-year-old heroine of "Bulletproof Mascara," a debut action-adventure novel for women written by Tacoma author Bethany Maines.

Nikki's meddlesome mother urges her to look into an opportunity selling makeup door-to-door for the Carrie Mae Cosmetics Company. Nikki is unenthusiastic but she has nothing better to do so she assents to attending a seminar in British Columbia.



Handsome stranger

Once there, she almost misses the program when she is sidetracked into having lunch with a handsome and mysterious stranger she meets in the hotel bar. After an adventurous afternoon, Nikki returns to the seminar and, before she knows it, finds herself a newly anointed Carrie Mae rep.

Even when her sales career gets off to a bumpy start due to poor customer relations, it seems that the higher-ups at Carrie Mae have seen qualities in her that they like. They invite her to California for further training.

Nikki soon learns that the company's definition of "cover-up" is much broader than your typical SPF 15 facial foundation. The successful cosmetics branch of the Carrie Mae brand is a front for the company's more ambitious agenda:

Carrie Mae is an international espionage agency that works to support women's causes in developing countries, and Nikki has been selected to train as an undercover operative.



Double-duty

cosmetics

The training schedule is intensive and varied. Nikki learns how to hotwire cars and how to gather information at a cocktail party. There is martial arts training and firearms target practice. Trainees are introduced to a complete line of double-duty products that look like standard cosmetics but that really pack a punch - flash grenade lipstick, pepper spray perfume and more.

When Nikki graduates, she is paired with a chain-smoking, tough-talking veteran Carrie Mae agent and sent to Thailand on her first case, where she is plunged into a dangerous world involving the sex trade, arms dealers and high-stakes politics. To top things off, in a Bangkok night club, she bumps into the handsome man she had met in the bar in Canada.

How can that be a coincidence?

"Bulletproof Mascara" has an inventive plot, exotic settings, lively characters and a likable heroine. The book plays out as a romp, but Maines has woven a conscience into this story, too.

So what's not to like?

Call me curmudgeonly, but Maines would have benefited from at least one more draft. Dialogue, particularly in the opening chapters, is pedestrian. Exposition is ham-handed in some places and disappointingly thin in other spots. Chapters should be tightened up and story pacing improved.

This story line has definite potential as a series, but Maines deserves an editor who is tough.

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com.