There’s still time to change the road you’re on

This is book thirteen in the Operation Quickline Series. The paperback runs roughly 300 pages and is available for $15.99, and the ebook costs $3.99.

Synopsis for Paths Not Taken

When the head of Operation Quickline, the ultra-secret organization that Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn work for, sets up a sting at the resort belonging to Lisa’s parents, Lisa and Sid are fit to be tied. But telling Dale O’Connor no is not possible.

Summer hire Dusty Simpson is the target, and Sid and Lisa reluctantly take on surveilling him while working the same jobs they had as teens. Sid’s working the restaurant at Wycherly’s Family Resort. Lisa is head of housekeeping. Even their son Nick is hired to bus tables.

But then an old nemesis shows up, and the sting becomes nothing like what Sid and Lisa thought. The nemesis is killed and it looks like a trap was set for Dusty. Not to mention that a computer disk with critical data has disappeared.

With her academic career in a questionable state, Nick awash in adolescent angst, and her father getting too close to her secret double life, Lisa is faced with the ultimate do-over.

Why I wrote it

The fun part of Paths Not Taken is that it answers a lot of questions from past Quickline books, including one that really isn’t articulated. In the first book, That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine, it’s never made entirely clear why Lisa would rather move into the house of a total (and potentially dangerous) stranger rather than work for her parents. That she has a taste for adventure is clear, but it’s not until this book that we see just how deeply that taste runs, not to mention the big disincentive she had.

I also love that Nick gets sulky. Given the brevity of his relationship with Sid and Lisa – he’s only known them for five years at this point, and been with them full time for only three years – it makes sense that he wouldn’t be testing them as an adolescent as much as another kid who’d been with his parents all his life. Nor are Sid and Lisa the perfect parents, and Sid blows it big time in this one, so Nick has a reason to be sulky.

I sometimes think that the Quickline series is more about how to have a normal life when your job is anything but. Paths Not Taken is a lot of that.