Bitter Tree

She was sent to kill him. She married him instead.

Eleanor was a teenage girl with no family, no future, and no one who cared. Then the CIA recruited her, trained her to kill, and sent her halfway around the world to eliminate a French archaeologist named Rene Laval. His crime? Discovering something in the deserts of Saudi Arabia that could destroy the global oil supply forever.

She was supposed to end his life. Instead, she fell in love, defied her handlers, and married the man she was ordered to kill. Now she's a fugitive, hunted by the agency that made her, targeted by terrorists who want what her husband found, and hiding in the last place anyone would look.

A small-town Texas church.

She calls herself Lisa. She's barefoot, bright-eyed, and impossibly charming. She bakes raspberry pudding for the sick, wins over the pastor's family, and never lets anyone see the Katana blade strapped beneath her cotton skirt or the photographic memory that can recall any map at a single glance.

But the men who want her dead are closing in. When armed intruders storm the pastor's home, the quiet life she built shatters in seconds, and Fiona Carter, the pastor's wife, is dragged into a desperate flight across the Texas Hill Country with the most dangerous woman she has ever met.

Meanwhile, half a continent away, Rene, disguised as a priest and riding a stolen Harley, fights his way across America to find the wife he lost when a Saudi prison tore them apart. Every mile brings him closer to Eleanor. Every mile brings them both closer to a confrontation that could end everything.

At the heart of the storm: a microbe born from a tree described in the Book of Exodus, an organism capable of devouring every drop of petroleum it touches. Terrorists want to unleash it. Governments want it buried. And Eleanor, armed with a blade and a broken heart, is the only one who can stop it.

Bitter Tree is a relentless, heart-pounding thriller about love, betrayal, and the price of defiance. For readers who like their heroines fierce, their stakes global, and their pages turning long past midnight.