Covert Assignment by Missy Marciassa
Publication date: December 2nd 2013
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult
Synopsis:
Covert Assignment is a New Adult, Coming of Age Novel with a strong romantic element. Elle is ready for graduation and full-fledged adulthood: no more living like the leftover of her parent’s divorce. She’s about to graduate with her degree in Information Science (the 21st century term for Library Science) and has a ten-year plan as well-designed as any model for analyzing metadata: earn her JD/MBA, enjoy a couple of years as a single professional, then marry her college sweetheart, Adam, and start her own family.
Yet Elle feels like she returned to an alternate universe her final semester. There are pictures of Adam with a classmate who must be surgically enhanced, but he insists he wants Elle. CIA recruiters show up on campus, and they aren’t just interested in recruiting Elle for future employment: turns out she’s already working for them since they’re funding her thesis. Hot operative Preston Raddick is tasked to work with her. Preston isn’t just hot: he’s hot for Elle, but is he offering happy ever after or happy for right now? A fling with Preston could be the beginning of a new life plan, which is exciting and scary, especially with espionage thrown in. Elle needs a predictive model to tell her which decisions have the greater likelihood for happiness…
Covert Assignment is about the unexpected turns life can take when making “adult” decisions.
Book Links
Excerpt:
Elle and Adam
discussing his cheating
Adam stared at her for a moment before looking away. Elle
watched him as he looked everywhere but at her. He swallowed hard several
times.
“I’m sitting here,” Elle finally said, waving her fingers at
him. He was going to have to look her in the eye and lie if he was busy
thinking one up.
Adam looked directly at her. “I was drunk,” he said.
“So?” That wasn’t going to cut it. “We’ve been drunk plenty
of times. You’ve never…” Elle thought of the picture of him screwing her from
behind and tried to get the visual out of her head. “… you’ve never done that.”
Adam swallowed more beer. “We’ve had sex,” he said.
Was he going to make her say it? “Not like that,” Elle
insisted.
Adam looked like he was about to jump out of his seat or
fidget his way out of it. “It wasn’t anything serious! She doesn’t mean
anything to me. We have plans, a future. I still want that.”
They did have a plan. A good plan. Elle knew, however, that
just like a mathematical model, plans were not infallible. Adam was no stranger
to mathematical models, so she decided to approach things from that angle.
“Think of a mathematical model,” Elle said. Adam’s eyebrows
raised, but he didn’t say anything, so she continued. “All models rest on
certain assumptions, right?”
Adam nodded and swallowed more beer. He looked wary about
where this conversation was headed.
“And when you find out the assumptions you based your model
on are violated, then the whole model comes into question, right?”
Adam was beginning to look rather queasy as he nodded.
“And then there are the variables in the model.” Elle heard
her voice become stronger, steadier. She was on terra firma now. “If you don’t
have the right variables or you don’t have them weighted correctly, then the
results are inaccurate. The model is flawed.”
Adam was still nodding as Elle looked at him expectantly.
After some silence, he asked, “So where are you going with this?”
Elle wanted to reach across the table and slap him for being
dense if nothing else. “I’m saying,” she began, pausing to drink some beer,
“maybe our model… is flawed in some way.”
“No.” Adam shook his head with vigor for emphasis. “Our
model is not flawed. This incident is just an outlier.”
“I had certain… assumptions,” Elle replied.
“Those assumptions are valid,” Adam insisted.
Elle raised an eyebrow. Oh, really? “Those assumptions were
violated.”
About the Author:
Missy Marciassa loved getting lost in novels from the time she could read, so it’s no surprise she wanted to write. Her very first “novels” were re-writing the books she read to get the endings she wanted in second grade. Missy continued to read and write through grade school and high school.
After becoming rather disillusioned with fiction after writing literary criticism as an English major in college, however, Missy focused on her enjoyment of learning about people and studied psychology. Reading fiction fell to the wayside with all the reading and writing required for college and graduate school, but once Missy became a doctoral candidate, she rediscovered her love of fiction. Then she started getting the urge to write, an urge that wouldn’t go away (she refuses to diagnose it as a compulsion). Covert Assignment is the end result of that urge.
Connect with Missy Marciassa
Thanks for being on the tour, Kathryn! :)
ReplyDeleteGlad to take part!
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