After a mission gone terribly wrong, former Navy SEAL Hale Carter has made a good career for himself at Treasure Hunter Security. He gets to use his engineering skills designing new gadgets, his SEAL skills providing security for exciting expeditions and treasure hunts, and he enjoys a variety of ladies on his downtime. He might still be plagued by nightmares, but all in all, life is good. Then he volunteers for a dangerous undercover mission into the Kalahari Desert, alongside a cool, attractive FBI agent who challenges him at every turn.

Special Agent Elin Alexander is driven to bring down the deadly black-market antiquities ring Silk Road. She's experienced firsthand how they destroy lives and she's vowed to end their greed and killing. After months of undercover work, she's eager for the mission to find the Lost City of the Kalahari. What she wasn't expecting was six-feet-three inches of former Navy SEAL as her partner. Hale is too handsome, too sexy, and isn't inclined to follow orders.

As the pair infiltrate the Silk Road hunt, Hale and Elin find themselves fighting a scorching attraction as they work to discover just what the lost city is hiding. But stuck in the bowels of a legendary ancient mine, Hale and Elin must put their trust in each other, to not only save the day, but to get out alive.

My Review:

I keep wanting to type Unraveled instead of Untraveled, because there is plenty of travel in this entry in the Treasure Hunter Security series, and plenty of things that get unraveled, including the misapprehensions that hold FBI Agent Elin Alexander and Treasure Hunter Security Agent (and ex-SEAL) Carter Hale back from getting involved with anyone, especially each other.

THS and FBI nemesis Silk Road is at it again, on the track of a mythical site that they are certain holds great treasure and great power, this time hidden somewhere in the brutal Kalahari Desert. Agent Alexander has been operating undercover with the Silk Road cell that believes they have pinpointed the famous Lost City of the Kalahari, and that somewhere amongst its legendary treasures lies the equally famous Seal of Solomon, a ring that supposedly gave King Solomon the power to command demons and djinn, and to speak with animals – and possibly more.

If it exists, it is valuable beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, just as a symbol, especially since that symbol is purported to contain one of the largest uncut diamonds ever discovered.

Agent Alexander sees this operation as her way to get back at Silk Road for the death of her father, as well as a way to score her long-sought promotion to a multi-agency team in Europe with Interpol. It’s a promotion that is guaranteed to give her way more opportunities to settle her score with Silk Road, but her single-minded pursuit of that goal has left her little time or inclination for relationships that might get in the way of her career. Her marriage was just one of the casualties of that pursuit.

Carter Hale sees himself as damaged. He left the SEALs as the last survivor of his team, a team that he was not able to save. THS keeps him busy and gives him a way to use the skills that the U.S. Navy spent so many years training into him. His sideline, tinkering with operations gear and making the top-of-the-line even better has brought him a surprising measure of financial security. He’s at THS to keep his demons at bay.

But traveling undercover through the unforgiving Kalahari desert, knowing that their companions are homicidal lunatics, only able to trust each other, forges a bond that neither Erin nor Carter is willing to break.

Even though they both believe that they must. If they get out alive.

Escape Rating B: Untraveled is a solid entry in the Treasure Hunter Security series. It’s a lot of fun to read, as are all the books in the series. And while Undiscovered is the story that begins the journey, it probably isn’t necessary to read them all, or to read them all in order, in order to enjoy any particular one.

Untraveled very much fits into the pattern of this series, where THS is hired to protect an an absolutely fabulous find or legendary place and has to battle the entirely evil and mercenary Silk Road. As the adventure progresses, the hero and heroine find themselves isolated and in deadly danger, and finally give in to the attraction that has been simmering between them from their first meeting. As an added bonus, the “macguffin” that they eventually find is usually even more magnificent and more legendary than anyone imagined.

In this particular case it’s that the Lost City of the Kalahari, King Solomon’s Mines and the legendary treasure city of Ophir are all one and the same.

It’s a fun pattern, and Untraveled certainly shows just how well it works. Because I love this author and her writing, I have a couple of small quibbles that kept Untraveled from rising to a B+. As an undercover FBI agent, Erin Alexander plays a bit fast and loose with her cover. If she’s embedded with a group this crazy and this paranoid, she would not break cover for anything, certainly not to interrogate a low-level operative and then turn him over to local police forces. Someone is bound to talk, and they do, exposing both Alexander and her THS partner.

The ending of the story includes one of my least favorite tropes, the one where the guy, deciding that he’s unworthy, tries to give up the love of his life because he’s so damn certain that it’s better for her, without bothering to ask her what she wants. I hate that one every time. Erin should have slapped him silly after she grabbed him.

And unlike most of the other THS books, while we do find the mysterious artifact, we don’t seem to discover what the thing is or does. I mean, yes, it’s a ring with a honking big diamond in it, but we knew that at the beginning. While no one expects it to be able to call demons or djinn, so far, all of the previously discovered artifacts have had some surprisingly cool powers, which have generally been revealed in rather spectacular rescues, catastrophes or bits of both. On this one, the jury seems to still be out, even when the book ends.

On my other hand, one thing I’m very, very curious about is that another player was introduced into this rivalry between THS and Silk Road. There’s another group sticking their oar into these particularly choppy waters, and its someone that the FBI seems to think they can play some kind of ball with.

Or at least lead FBI Agent Alistair Burke acts as if he can control them. Whether he can control anything, including the crazy unresolved sexual tension between himself and THS’s co-owner and tech wizard Darcy Ward is something that readers will hopefully see resolved in a future entry in the series. I’m really waiting for that one.