Left to Fear, An Adele Sharp Mystery, is Book 10 in the series by Blake Pierce.
Agents Adele Sharp and Frenchman John Renee have finally decided to see where there relationship will lead them - and they're hoping it can stay under the radar since their boss (Foucault) warned them that professionally a relationship between them was a definite no-no. But they've worked well together in spite of their totally opposite approaches to their cases. John's a brute-force kind of guy with the stature and muscle mass to accommodate it. Adele is the thinker and tries to out-maneuver the bad guys. They've managed to respect each other's "techniques" in spite of the occasional friction John's can produce in Adele.
There have been two murders of single women from wealthy families on tourist river boats in Europe. The new owner is represented by his attorney who is unflinching in keeping the boats running in spite of the murders, but when a third one occurs with an accompanying rose and note, it's time to take a harder approach. After the murders, finally there's a clue and something to work with instead of arriving in different countries just in time to board the boats where the victims lie strangled.
With an occasional outburst from John in their search and some harrowing boat boarding, they finally make some headway with some unexpected help from the owner of the boats who was once a suspect.
But underlying this case is the Spade Killer's assault on Adele's father who lives in Germany. She's been searching for this killer ever since she was old enough to become an agent because he murdered her mother. He's also killed her close mentor and friend Robert, and now this attack on her dad. Her dad stubbornly insists she work on her current case, and she wants to get it solved so she can find the weird little man, who calls himself an artist and his victims "canvasses", and who has murdered - as in carved up - and now attempted to murder her loved ones. There have been some "almost" catches, but he's escaped every time.
Blake Pierce has written a supremely entertaining series in these Adele Sharp mysteries. Adele was only briefly unlikable when she treated John badly, and the two of them work very well together in spite of their abrupt differences and are occasionally humorous together. However, this novel, from the techincal standpoint, suffered from some mistakes a reader doesn't usually see from this author. The word "wince" or "winced" must have appeared 20 times within a few pages, occasional words were left out, and because of these, at times the story felt rushed. That's just my opinion because someone didn't spend a lot of time proofing it for incidental errors such as these. Nevertheless, it's an interesting story and a typically good mystery from this author, leaving us once again in a quandary over the Spade Killer at the end.
Father, as I repeatedly state: only you know hearts, only you save souls. I pray you would continue to bless Blake and provide more fascinating stories. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.