Vyper
—A Laynie Portland Sequel—
Release Date: October 2; Preorder Available
Preorder Vyper in your preferred eBook format for an October 2 delivery. Preorder a signed print book directly from Vikki by sending email to vikki@vikkikestell.com. Books will be mailed out no later than November 6. Book and shipping: $23.
Task Force Resolute is a small yet highly effective band of intelligence analysts. Resolute’s mandate is to hunt terrorists online, uncover the threats they pose, and track them to their lairs. At that point, Resolute is to hand off its actionable intelligence to agency assets equipped to neutralize terrorist threats before their plots can mature.
Director Wolfe provides the funding and agency umbrella under which Resolute operates; Bella Tobin serves as Resolute’s team leader. However, Bella is not her actual name. It is the current cover identity of Laynie Portland, quintessential spy extraordinaire, an agent who operated under strict cover in Sweden and Russia for more than twenty years before “coming in from the cold.”
Enter Resolute’s top analyst, Jasmine Jessup, or Jaz as she prefers. In front of her teammates, Jaz cuts a touchy, solitary, and peculiar figure. Furthermore, she is not a trained agent, not a field operative. So why would Director Wolfe tap Jaz for a dicey field assignment—one he insists has her name written all over it?
As it turns out, Wolfe, Bella, and Task Force Resolute guard Jaz’s most precious secret: Within the upper echelons of international hacking, Jaz’s brilliance and reputation are legend—for behind a keyboard, Jaz reigns as Vyper, the Venom Queen, a hacker whose handle instills both dread and reverence across the globe.
It is Vyper who Director Wolfe desperately needs for this dangerous assignment.
What Jaz’s teammates are not privy to are Vyper’s origins. In fact, few individuals alive are aware that Jaz has a shadowed and dangerous past, a past hidden behind a thick wall of counterfeit identities—more aliases than even Laynie Portland could boast.
As Jaz trains and prepares for her assignment, she must confront the ghosts of her past ... not realizing that those ghosts are hunting her.