Review: A Covert Conquest by Ravenna Tate

YAY!!  Another installment of “The Weathermen” series!  This is quickly become one of my favorite series, ever.  Ravenna tate has taken an interesting and topical subject and built a whole world around it.  I love the characters, the ongoing mystery, and the (oh my!) the heat between the couples.

A quick rundown.  In the year 2112, a group of scientests create a computer program they’ve called The Madeline Project.  It’s goal is to release electrical pulses into clouds to try to prevent catastrophic storms like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and blizzards. In 2117, a real time test proves to be relatively successful, but there is a group of hackers who upload a virus into the project, and what happens is exactly what The Madeline project was trying to prevent.  Apocalyptic storms make 85% of the Earth completely uninhabitalbe.  Those who didn’t die in the storms have moved underground into “cities” built several years before during a nuclear war scare.  A group of 12 very wealthy men, college friends, calling themselves “The Weathermen” are doing whatever they can to try to find, capture, and punish the hackers.  They want to try to rebuild the surface to that people can return home.

Every book concentrates on one of the men, and the woman who he falls in love with.  In “A Covert Conquest” we have Barclay Hampton, owner of Hampton Data, and Rissa Kerry who works in the company’s IT department.  In the restroom of a wedding Rissa doesn’t even want to be in, she overhears a couple whispering in the next stall about Barclay Data, Barclay himself, blackmail, and a missing laptop.  Realizing that this is information Barclay should know, she calls him and lets him know what she heard.

This information turns out to be extremely important.  That missing laptop could hold the key to the hackers’ names and whereabouts.  Barclay notifies his friends, gets the laptop, and hires Rissa to help him dig through the contents.

The story really takes off from there, and I’m not going to give it away.  It’s exciting and a little tense as we get closer and closer to finding out who is responsible for Earth’s destruction.  Barclay and Rissa have a great chemistry together, and it’s obvious that they’re falling for each other.

Yes, Rissa is a bit leery, but he’s very convincing.  The sex scenes are amazing and scorching.  The love between them is sweet and perfect.  There was nothing about this book that I didn’t enjoy. I highly recommend this series.  This is book seven, and you really do need to start at the beginning with “An Appetite for Blackmail” and move through the rest.  If you don’t, you’ll be completely lost.  Also, they’re just really good stories that will lead you toward what will surely be a fantastic endgame.