Here's the second review that I've done for the Joe Bob website. I'm still waiting to see the first posted, but the books are piling up and if I ever want to read anything BUT the review books I better not wait.

I may make a few changes before I submit this, but I'm pretty satisfied with the review as it now stands.

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With a Vengeance by Eileen Dreyer; published by St. Martin’s Press

Face it, everybody has a ‘List’, whether you call it that or not. There are just some folks who piss you off so much that you’d like to see them put up against a wall and shot. You may not put it down on paper, but somewhere in the back of you mind you probably add at least one person to that list every week. Maybe you and some co-workers, or some friends, even share a list. The boss is probably there, plus a particularly annoying salesperson or the guy who ‘fixes’ the photocopier which breaks down within an hour of his visit.

Now suppose there are a group of folks who not only have such a list, but actually go and do something about it. Their list doesn’t include just folks who are annoying, but folks who are dangerous. Rapists, child molesters, wife beaters and a whole range of people that the world would not miss and might actually be better off without.

Dreyer introduces us to Maggie O’Brien, trauma nurse and medic on a SWAT team. Maggie is the daughter of a former policeman, who was ‘retired’ from the force when he took the rap for a junior officer guilty of police brutality. Much to the disgust of her father, Maggie is not following in his footsteps. She not only does not become a police officer, but even now that she is a member of SWAT, she refuses to carry a gun.

Maggie knows about The List, which is scribbled on the break room in the hospital in which she works. Not only that, but Maggie herself has written more than a few names herself. It’s only when she witnesses the death of a homeless man, whom she has befriended, that she begins to suspect that some folks around her are taking The List a bit more seriously than she does.

Dreyer, herself a forensic nurse, creates in Maggie a believable and troubled woman. Taught, from childhood, to believe in justice, Maggie finds that those whom she has considered her friends may have a very, different idea of how justice can be achieved.

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I have a feeling that I probably should have made this review longer, but I don't want to pad the thing.