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Texas Confidential #4
The Outsider's Redemption
The Mission: Escort an Expectant Mother...To the Enemy?
Cody Gannon had never belonged anywhere until he'd joined Texas Confidential, but now even that haven had become uncertain. Cody was alone again, and determined to prove himself....
But was turning in single mother-to-be Sarah Rand the way to do it? He'd been told she was the enemy, but her vulnerable green eyes told a different story. Someone had lured them both into the open and would stop at nothing to get the information Sarah carried with her. And now with Sarah's condition and his newfound love for her a priority, Cody came to a hard realization. To keep Sarah safe, he would have to break the law....
- GenresRomance
242 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
4 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
About the author
Joanna Wayne
187 books59 followersReal name: Jo Ann Vest
Pseudonyms: Joanna Wayne.
Joanna Wayne began her professional writing career with the release of her first novel, DEEP IN THE BAYOU, in 1994, but Joanna will be the first to tell you that the wheels were set in motion years before. She started reading at four years of age, the same age that she began making weekly trips to the library to check out as many books as they’d let her have, only to finish reading them all before bedtime. That love of books never waned.
Joanna was born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana and was the middle child of a large family. She moved to New Orleans, Louisiana in 1984 when she married her current husband. New Orleans opened up a whole new realm of activities and she found the mix of cultures, music, history, food and sultry southern classics along with her love of reading a natural impetus for beginning her writing career. It was there that she attended her first writing class and joined her first professional writing organization. From that point on, there was no looking back.
Now, forty published books later, Joanna has made a name for herself as being on the cutting edge of romantic suspense in both series and mainstream novels. She is known for the suspense and emotion she brings to the page, as she takes ordinary people and thrusts them into life-and-death situations. She has been on the Walden Bestselling List for romance and won many industry awards. She is a popular speaker at writing organizations and local community functions and has taught creative writing at the University of New Orleans Metropolitan College.
She currently resides in a small community forty miles north of Houston, Texas with her husband. Though she still has many family and emotional ties to Louisiana, she loves living in the Lone Star state.
Pseudonyms: Joanna Wayne.
Joanna Wayne began her professional writing career with the release of her first novel, DEEP IN THE BAYOU, in 1994, but Joanna will be the first to tell you that the wheels were set in motion years before. She started reading at four years of age, the same age that she began making weekly trips to the library to check out as many books as they’d let her have, only to finish reading them all before bedtime. That love of books never waned.
Joanna was born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana and was the middle child of a large family. She moved to New Orleans, Louisiana in 1984 when she married her current husband. New Orleans opened up a whole new realm of activities and she found the mix of cultures, music, history, food and sultry southern classics along with her love of reading a natural impetus for beginning her writing career. It was there that she attended her first writing class and joined her first professional writing organization. From that point on, there was no looking back.
Now, forty published books later, Joanna has made a name for herself as being on the cutting edge of romantic suspense in both series and mainstream novels. She is known for the suspense and emotion she brings to the page, as she takes ordinary people and thrusts them into life-and-death situations. She has been on the Walden Bestselling List for romance and won many industry awards. She is a popular speaker at writing organizations and local community functions and has taught creative writing at the University of New Orleans Metropolitan College.
She currently resides in a small community forty miles north of Houston, Texas with her husband. Though she still has many family and emotional ties to Louisiana, she loves living in the Lone Star state.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 5, 2023
Fun, adventurous, sexy, scary....all the feels! Great story!
November 3, 2025
2/5 STARS! Fun series but I hate single mom stories. Also I think she got out of way too much. Still fun though. Lovely ending!
June 24, 2015
I tend to avoid books that are part of a multi-author series. Generally I find them unfinished and incapable of standing alone, and the need to read the other books, from authors I may or may not like, grates on me.
I do find myself making the odd exception, like this book. I often like Joanna Wayne (although some of her books are much better than others) and I was caught up by the picture on the front: a profile shot of an utterly gorgeous male who looks like a cross between my friend Apollo and Zac Efron. Yes, this nearly-30-year-old girl finds Zac Efron attractive. Go ahead and judge me. Everyone does.
But I digress. I picked this up in the charity shop because I liked the picture.
Did I like the book? Ehh. It was okay. Not great, not awful.
Cody, cowboy and youngest member of elite government group Texas Confidential, has just quit his job after finding out that his boss is actually the father who abandoned him and his mother to the hands of a violent stepfather. He's angrily driving around Texas, trying to figure out what to do with his life, when he gets approached by someone who claims to be an old friend and fellow agent, who has a job for him to do. He needs to pick up Sarah, a government secretary from DC who's stolen a bunch of files and is planning to deliver them to international drug dealer / arms dealer / some sort of baddie (I forget which) Tomaso Calderone, who the Texas Confidential agents have been trying to catch. Of course, this is a set-up. Supposedly Sarah thinks that she's getting paid to deliver files to the bad guy, but the good guys are setting a trap to catch her out. Cody jumps at the chance - not only will he help catch the bad-girl secretary who's passing government info to Calderone, maybe he'll also be able to catch the Big Boss himself, thus sticking it to his own boss, aka Mitchell Forbes, aka Dad.
But when he picks Sarah up at the airport, nothing goes right. She's pregnant, for one thing. She claims to be retrieving info for the good guys, not the bad ones. Then she gets attacked by someone wanting the disk with the files, even though nobody's supposed to know what she's doing. The two of them get attacked a second time, at the camp they're spending the night at, and a night watchman is killed - implicating Cody and Sarah in his murder. Then the disk gets stolen. Or lost. Or something. So the two are on the run, not just from the bad guys but also from the law.
I liked Cody. His moodiness and Eeyore-like tendencies put him just on the edge between nicely tortured and annoyingly pessimistic, but he didn't fall over into annoying territory. Sarah, the heroine, was a little bland for my tastes. I didn't get a lot of personality from her.
I wasn't overly keen on the plot. It didn't seem as tight as it should have been, and there was a lot of running around not really doing much. In a book as short as this one, there shouldn't be time for waffling. Several times the characters chose a plan of action - like breaking into the Texas Confidential headquarters, to hack into the government files (see below) - that never really got followed through to any achievement. I suppose it's possible that they got something out of this and I just missed it, but it seemed to me like a whole lot of effort for nothing. Just running in circles.
The above example was just one of the unbelievable things. A government system that's that easily hackable from a remote computer? Ehh, I'm not a computer expert, nor (God forbid) a government expert, but that sounded fishy to me. Also, Cody - supposedly a well-trained agent - trusting a man he met in a bar, just because he claimed to be an old friend in disguise...that doesn't hold water with me either. Even young, hotheaded agents with something to prove aren't that naïve. I hope. And Sarah never really gave her reasons for smuggling the information. If it's going to the good guys, they should already have access to it, no?
I still rated this a 3-star, though, because I didn't dislike it. Joanna Wayne has an easy-to-read style of writing that's usually quite entertaining and holds my attention for a couple hours, even when the plot doesn't quite hold up. There's also a certain sweetness in her characters, particularly the men, that makes me want them to have a happy ending. I do think that she generally does better when she's writing a standalone novel that's not so constrained by plot, but if you want to read a different series she's been part of, I'd recommend the much tighter, better-plotted New Orleans Confidential series (which is based along the same lines as this one).
This one? Average. 3 stars.
I do find myself making the odd exception, like this book. I often like Joanna Wayne (although some of her books are much better than others) and I was caught up by the picture on the front: a profile shot of an utterly gorgeous male who looks like a cross between my friend Apollo and Zac Efron. Yes, this nearly-30-year-old girl finds Zac Efron attractive. Go ahead and judge me. Everyone does.
But I digress. I picked this up in the charity shop because I liked the picture.
Did I like the book? Ehh. It was okay. Not great, not awful.
Cody, cowboy and youngest member of elite government group Texas Confidential, has just quit his job after finding out that his boss is actually the father who abandoned him and his mother to the hands of a violent stepfather. He's angrily driving around Texas, trying to figure out what to do with his life, when he gets approached by someone who claims to be an old friend and fellow agent, who has a job for him to do. He needs to pick up Sarah, a government secretary from DC who's stolen a bunch of files and is planning to deliver them to international drug dealer / arms dealer / some sort of baddie (I forget which) Tomaso Calderone, who the Texas Confidential agents have been trying to catch. Of course, this is a set-up. Supposedly Sarah thinks that she's getting paid to deliver files to the bad guy, but the good guys are setting a trap to catch her out. Cody jumps at the chance - not only will he help catch the bad-girl secretary who's passing government info to Calderone, maybe he'll also be able to catch the Big Boss himself, thus sticking it to his own boss, aka Mitchell Forbes, aka Dad.
But when he picks Sarah up at the airport, nothing goes right. She's pregnant, for one thing. She claims to be retrieving info for the good guys, not the bad ones. Then she gets attacked by someone wanting the disk with the files, even though nobody's supposed to know what she's doing. The two of them get attacked a second time, at the camp they're spending the night at, and a night watchman is killed - implicating Cody and Sarah in his murder. Then the disk gets stolen. Or lost. Or something. So the two are on the run, not just from the bad guys but also from the law.
I liked Cody. His moodiness and Eeyore-like tendencies put him just on the edge between nicely tortured and annoyingly pessimistic, but he didn't fall over into annoying territory. Sarah, the heroine, was a little bland for my tastes. I didn't get a lot of personality from her.
I wasn't overly keen on the plot. It didn't seem as tight as it should have been, and there was a lot of running around not really doing much. In a book as short as this one, there shouldn't be time for waffling. Several times the characters chose a plan of action - like breaking into the Texas Confidential headquarters, to hack into the government files (see below) - that never really got followed through to any achievement. I suppose it's possible that they got something out of this and I just missed it, but it seemed to me like a whole lot of effort for nothing. Just running in circles.
The above example was just one of the unbelievable things. A government system that's that easily hackable from a remote computer? Ehh, I'm not a computer expert, nor (God forbid) a government expert, but that sounded fishy to me. Also, Cody - supposedly a well-trained agent - trusting a man he met in a bar, just because he claimed to be an old friend in disguise...that doesn't hold water with me either. Even young, hotheaded agents with something to prove aren't that naïve. I hope. And Sarah never really gave her reasons for smuggling the information. If it's going to the good guys, they should already have access to it, no?
I still rated this a 3-star, though, because I didn't dislike it. Joanna Wayne has an easy-to-read style of writing that's usually quite entertaining and holds my attention for a couple hours, even when the plot doesn't quite hold up. There's also a certain sweetness in her characters, particularly the men, that makes me want them to have a happy ending. I do think that she generally does better when she's writing a standalone novel that's not so constrained by plot, but if you want to read a different series she's been part of, I'd recommend the much tighter, better-plotted New Orleans Confidential series (which is based along the same lines as this one).
This one? Average. 3 stars.
February 23, 2018
I really enjoyed this book. The characters Cody, and Sarah pulled me right into the story. The suspense of the plot was really good. At times I didn't see how the good guys could win against the almighty Calderone. He was a man, that many departments, secret agents, and DPS had tried to take down for many years. He would have anyone butchered, that got in his way.
Sarah is a secretary that works for a big agency in D.C. She hates Calderone. When Dan Austin asked Sarah to copy files and put them on a disk, to help bring down Calderone, she didn't blink an eye. Dan asked her to bring him the files. He said he would have a body guard waiting for her at the airport. Cody knew he was picking up Sarah. He thought he was picking up someone that was going to sale secrets to the enemy. He had no idea Sarah would be pregnant. Sarah was expecting a big man to be her bodyguard, not some skinny cowboy. She had no idea that Cody was a special agent that was part of a Elite team named the Texas Confidential. The meeting at the airport was a bit comical . She pulled a fast one on Cody.
Cody, and Sarah have been set up. They are just pawns in a deadly game. the good guys think that Cody, and Sarah have turned, and want to arrest them. The bad guys are coming after the disk. Cody, and Sarah have nowhere to run. they have to learn to trust one another to stay alive.
This was a excellent book!
Sarah is a secretary that works for a big agency in D.C. She hates Calderone. When Dan Austin asked Sarah to copy files and put them on a disk, to help bring down Calderone, she didn't blink an eye. Dan asked her to bring him the files. He said he would have a body guard waiting for her at the airport. Cody knew he was picking up Sarah. He thought he was picking up someone that was going to sale secrets to the enemy. He had no idea Sarah would be pregnant. Sarah was expecting a big man to be her bodyguard, not some skinny cowboy. She had no idea that Cody was a special agent that was part of a Elite team named the Texas Confidential. The meeting at the airport was a bit comical . She pulled a fast one on Cody.
Cody, and Sarah have been set up. They are just pawns in a deadly game. the good guys think that Cody, and Sarah have turned, and want to arrest them. The bad guys are coming after the disk. Cody, and Sarah have nowhere to run. they have to learn to trust one another to stay alive.
This was a excellent book!
September 25, 2009
Modern
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews