Latest Books The Big Thrill Recommends: IT HAD TO BE YOU by Eliza Jane Brazier

The Big Thrill Recommends: IT HAD TO BE YOU by Eliza Jane Brazier

Recommended by Neil Nyren

Two professional assassins, a man and a woman, partners—and each other’s targets. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, right? We’ve seen this before. But in Eliza Jane Brazier’s twisty, steamy, always surprising, IT HAD TO BE YOU, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Eva and Jonathan, not their real names. They meet on a train from Florence to Paris. Eva was there commemorating the death of her fiancé two years before. Jonathan was there on a job. The moment is electric for both of them and leads to sex in a luggage compartment, an act hampered slightly by the fact that he has a bullet in his body, which she does not know, and when he disappears without a word, she is miffed, but that’s the way things go.

Except he almost died on that train because of the bullet, and when he recovers, he can’t get her out of his head, and he prowls Paris in search of her. Annoyingly for Eva, he seems to have taken up residence in her head, too. Ah, well.

And then they meet again, six months later, at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, except that this time it is no accident. Eva has set it up. Jonathan is her next job. A bad man, she has been told, deranged, soulless. And yet….

What follows is an extraordinary story of two people, damaged since childhood, making up for it ever since, in a constantly shifting dance of death in which first one has the upper hand, and then the other, until a wild card appears.

Is everything they have done a lie? Is there something far more dangerous out there? Can they lay aside their mutual distrust—and mutual attraction—to uncover the truth? You may think you know what’s going to happen, but you don’t, as Brazier keeps pulling the rug out from under you again and again.

This book is epic fun.

Neil Nyren

Neil Nyren is the former EVP, associate publisher, and editor in chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons and the winner of the 2017 Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among the writers of crime and suspense he has edited are Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, John Sandford, C. J. Box, Robert Crais, Carl Hiaasen, Daniel Silva, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Jonathan Kellerman, Ed McBain, and Ace Atkins. He now writes about crime fiction and publishing for CrimeReads, BookTrib, The Big Thrill, and The Third Degree, among others, and is a contributing writer to the Anthony/Agatha/Macavity-winning How to Write a Mystery.

He is currently writing a monthly publishing column for the MWA newsletter The Third Degree, as well as a regular ITW-sponsored series on debut thriller authors for BookTrib.com and is an editor at large for CrimeReads.

The Big Thrill Recommends: IT HAD TO BE YOU by Eliza Jane Brazier