THE CHEMIST

A professional torturer on the run from her employers falls in with sexy twin brothers.

You probably know Meyer as the then-27-year-old Mormon housewife who woke up from a dream about vampires and gave the world Twilight, though in addition to that series she has already published one adult thriller (The Host, 2008). In her latest, she marries the genres of spy versus spy and throbbing romance novel with good results. Meet Juliana, or Alex, or Casey, or Chris—whatever her alias of the moment is, she’s an operative with a medical school background who specializes in chemically controlled torture and interrogation. Somewhere along the line, she learned too much about the secrets of her employers, and she now lives in a state of high-tech paranoia, sleeping in a bathtub wearing a gas mask in a secret location booby-trapped at every possible ingress. When her old boss calls her in for one last mission, she’s not sure she isn’t being double-crossed—but nonetheless proceeds with the kidnapping of Washington, D.C., schoolteacher Daniel Beach, who's purportedly part of a vile plot to release a virus that will wreak global doom. In fact, he is a man whose deep inner goodness is rivaled only by his scorching outer hotness—but our socially awkward virgin heroine won’t realize this until after she’s taken him to her secret lair, stripped him naked, strapped him to a table, and injected him with compounds that produce pure agony for 10 minutes at a time. The biochemical magic between them is even more powerful than the nasty drugs, and by the time his identical twin brother, a swashbuckling black-ops type, shows up to kill her and rescue him, love has bloomed in the torture chamber. As they begin to see through the layers of cross and double cross, the two agents decide to join forces and go into hiding together, with the brother of course, on a ranch in Texas with a pack of trained superdogs. A tale of skulduggery, bodice rippery, and shoot-'em-up action unfolds, complete with help from a luscious mistress of disguise who could have stepped right out of a James Bond novel.

Rated B for badass.