Meet Gabriela Rose, a recovery agent who makes a tidy living by retrieving everything from lost treasures to stolen heirlooms to missing assets of any kind. If you’ve lost it, she’ll find it and bring it back.

Gabriela is adept at weapons of all types, has some martial arts ability and stays cool under pressure. She even gets paid if the item is irretrievable, like a recently lost amulet that was swallowed by a panther, which led to a wild chase through the Ecuadorian wilderness in a canoe with a couple of shifty guides. Her contracts prudently call for a stiff retainer fee, plus her expenses to be covered if she is unable to locate the lost item. The “panther ate the amulet” is currently a work in progress.

"[R]eaders are treated to plenty of action, complicated relationships, laughs, dangerous underwater chases, pirates, and a lunatic who thinks he holds the powers of Supay, the god of death."

After paying off the guides in Ecuador, Gabriela powers up her cell phone for messages and hears her mother’s cheerful voice on the other end. She learns that her parents and grandmother are thinking about selling their house after the small South Carolina fishing village where she grew up was hit by a Category 4 hurricane. Businesses have been wiped out, the wharf is gone, people can’t sell their homes, promised funding has fallen through, and her father’s fishing business is caput. Now a developer is sniffing around offering low prices for what’s left, but her family doesn’t want to leave. They figure it would cost $15 million to fix the wharf, which would go a long way to help bring the town back to life.

Gabriela’s grandmother has a plan. “Annie,” a ghost who haunts her Great Auntie Margareet’s house on St. Vincent Island, often told tales of a secret room under the floorboards of one of the bedrooms. Margareet used to talk about the ghost, who declared that a chest that held maps and “all sorts of other things like diaries and jewels” belonging to the pirate Blackbeard was buried in that secret room.

Margareet never married, and when she died, she willed the house to Gabriela. According to family legend, Gabriela is descended from Blackbeard, courtesy of a clandestine affair between him and a long-departed ancestor, which makes her an heir to the contents of the chest. If the chest is indeed buried there, could it contain missing treasures, maps or even the Ring of Solomon? There have been reports of the ring’s discovery, but all have been hoaxes. It is believed to be worth at least $15 million, which would be enough to help restore Gabriela’s family’s fishing village.

However, there is an important hurdle to overcome. Gabriela had ceded ownership of the house to her ex-husband, Rafer, in their divorce settlement four years ago. Rafer now owns a dive shop in Kingstown, so she flies there, rents a car and drives to the house they once shared. A truck is in the garage, but nobody seems to be home. That’s no problem as she still has a key.

From this point on, readers are treated to plenty of action, complicated relationships, laughs, dangerous underwater chases, pirates, and a lunatic who thinks he holds the powers of Supay, the god of death. THE RECOVERY AGENT is an explosive start to this series, and I can’t wait to see what Janet Evanovich has in store for her protagonist next.