Holy moly, Allison Brennan has done it again. I just finished the 6th book in the Lucy Kincaid series, and the author has changed everything up once again. I never feel like I’m reading the same ol’, same ol’. In Stolen, Lucy is still at Quantico doing her training to make it into the FBI. However, she is a back seat character in her own series this time. . . which makes it doubly annoying that the tagline on the cover of the book implies that she’s the focus and that this is a romance thriller. There’s almost no romance to be had.
Instead of focusing on Lucy, the focus is on Lucy’s boyfriend, Sean. Sean was a “hacktivist” in college, someone who hacked into computer systems for the benefit of others. For instance, when he was at Sanford, he hacked into his professor’s computer and revealed the man was a pedophile. Sean was let go from the school for his illegal activity, but who wants to prosecute the guy who brought down someone who had child pornography?
While in college, Sean made friends with other hacktivists, including Colton, who was Sean’s rock when Sean’s own family either ignored him or felt he was a giant burden. After his parents died, Sean’s older brother, Duke, looked out for Sean but never wanted to. Another hacktivist was Skye, whom Sean dated. Lastly, was Hunter, who was paranoid but skilled in all things cyber.
After college, Sean didn’t know how to set out on his own, so he started working for RCK, a security company started by Duke, one of Lucy’s brothers, and a third character I have yet to meet. I’m assuming he was in another Brennan series. The company was established in California, but as Sean and Duke butted heads over how to work, Sean and Lucy’s brother started an east coast division of the company for a bit of breathing space. Duke always thinks Sean is a screw up, someone who bends the law too much, risking RCK and their reputation. Sean’s whole job is to test the security of physical buildings and cyberspaces of companies, sometimes even landing government contracts. He just doesn’t do exactly how Duke himself would.
Stolen begins with the assistant director of the FBI and Lucy’s mentor both approaching Sean with a scheme: if Sean literally quits RCK, he can rejoin Colton, Skye, and Hunter in a cyberhacking job that would give the FBI the opportunity to take down a corrupt senator. The only catch is Sean cannot tell anyone, not even Lucy, because people who know what’s going on could become a target. If he doesn’t quit RCK, which royally enrages Duke, the right people won’t believe Sean is working with the hacktivists. He also cannot tell his old college crew he’s working undercover, but he doesn’t want to anyway — there are two new crew members, so Sean doesn’t trust them.
The entire story hinges on one important fact: Sean committed another cyber crime in college after the pedophile bust, but he wasn’t sent to prison, and the statute of limitations is up in less than a year. That corrupt senator? He knows what Sean did and is blackmailing him, so if Sean works with the FBI to bring the senator down, he’s not only doing a good thing, he’s covering his own ass: “Maybe he’d agreed to go undercover because it would disappear his past. Except it wouldn’t. His past had been locked tight until now, and Sean had willingly opened the door.” If Sean were sent to prison, he would compromise Lucy’s chances at becoming an FBI agent, which is her dream.
Unlike previous Lucy Kincaid novels, the pieces aren’t adding up. Why did the senator hire Sean’s old college group to break into a pharmaceutical company? Who is the rogue FBI agent stalking Sean? Who is the mole in the FBI feeding information to the senator? Without Lucy to create a profile and find the links, everything is harder, but the entire operation is hush-hush, and only four people know what’s going on with Sean’s undercover work to avoid leaking info to the FBI mole.
Another page turner, for sure, I enjoyed Stolen a good deal, especially getting to know Sean’s inner thoughts better.
Grab the Lapels 
This one sounds like the book I would have connected with the most so far. On one hand, I find Information Security to be a necessary nuisance that adds a lot of cognitive friction to my work every day. On the other hand, I find “pen testing” that combines both physical and information security fascinating. It doesn’t matter if you have excellent security tools if your CTO insists on having permissions in every system they don’t need due to lack of trust, and maybe their assistant keeps their password on a sticky note under their keyboard… Or if they have a box with a keypad that they can use to buzz people into the building that is one of many models with a single “master override” key that you can order from the manufacturer no questions asked. I have watched consultants like this demonstrating some of their techniques and it ends up looking like an escape room game… in reverse. Either way, most of the series of books I have read needed an occasional change of perspective to maintain freshness. This sounded like a good one. I hope it doesn’t veer into the trope of the tension coming from Lucy not knowing what Sean has been up to and will she find out? 😱 Years ago, that’s what made me lose interest in the show Breaking Bad. I couldn’t take another episode of them tiptoeing around who would find out what when. How many of these do you have? I can’t wait to hear about the next one!
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I love you so much! 🥰 Also, okay, about your comment. I didn’t understand a lot of it because it’s very techie, but I get the gist. And can I just say there’s something super hot about Sean knowing how to break into everything? Now I’m wondering why I discourage you from breaking into everything, LOL. I think Lucy feeling frustrated because she doesn’t know what’s happening to Sean is very natural. They both have jobs that are extremely dangerous. We’ve seen this modeled with some of the other characters, like Lucy’s siblings. Some are in the special forces or police officers or the FBI, and they all tend to marry somebody who had an equally dangerous job. Maybe they’re a bunch of adrenaline junkies. If anything, it sounds like the plot of this novel brought Lucy and Sean closer together because he’d always been a risk taker, and now that he has somebody he really cares for, he understands that you can’t just take risks and expect that you’re the only person taking that risk. There are others affected. Lastly, I will say that Lucy stayed busy when Sean was missing. She was doing profiling and looking through evidence. I was worried that she would try and get to him and just be kidnapped in the process, but she’s not an idiot like that.
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I’m impressed that all these books sound both very different from each other and also quite complex.
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Me, too! I’m surprised each time, which was unexpected. Several years ago, when I was reading all those Valdemar books, I was amazed by how similar they all were, but still readable.
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Where is the romance damnit? Which is what I suspect many people were saying after they finished reading this book. There’s a woman’s face on the cover, yet this feels like a very man-heavy plot line, which of course is no problem, if the marketing matched what was on the inside!
Still, I’m so glad you’re having fun with these. I just started a cozy mystery series I’m going to write about on my blog, the publisher sent me all four in the series so I’m trying to read them all before I write my review 😉
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I think the romance is pretty low in all of them. It’s there on the page, as in adults typically have romantic companions, but the focus is never on the relationships. The advertising is weird to me. The covers are equally baffling. You’re right that the story was all about Sean but Lucy is on the cover. The other issue is the covers look nothing like Lucy. Her dad is Irish and her mom is Cuban, and Lucy (full name Lucia) is always described as looking Cuban.
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What Nick said, how many more of these do you have? I’m loving your enjoyment of them and your ability to identify what it is you like. It’s great that they aren’t formulaic but offer different perspectives. That’s frustrating about the front cover tagline. That sort of misleading stuff annoys me, the obvious marketing of something, whether it’s true or not.
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I just finished book number seven, and there are 18 books altogether. The marketing of the books is the only thing that I don’t like about them. The main character looks like her Cuban mother, but the book cover has this blonde on it. We’re told it’s a romance thriller, but the romance is just a tiny part of each book, anything that you would expect that has characters who are in a relationship. It is more thriller than procedural, but there’s quite a bit of procedural stuff in there.
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I must ask my daughter whether she’s read any … though she’s more into fantasy and funny/humorous crime I think.
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