WATER MEMORY by Daniel Pyne - Los Angeles Times 'Review: A kickass heroine who’s taken some kicks of her own'

Los Angeles Times | February 4, 2021

When “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was published some 15 years ago, it accelerated an unofficial crime subgenre with a rebooted style of heroine — the kick-ass female. Of course this wasn’t exactly new: Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller and other writers of previous generations wrote female protagonists who take no tea for the fever. But Stieg Larsson and the myriad 21st century writers who stand on their shoulders have taken those characters to new heights of physical prowess — even as they sometimes sucked plot, character development and even logic into their thrillers’ action-packed vortex.

Into this maelstrom comes Aubrey Sentro, the heroine of Daniel Pyne’s “Water Memory” — a former government agent who now works black ops missions for a private security firm called Solomon Systems. The blistering prologue establishes that Sentro knows her way around an exfiltration, despite a mix-up about the hotel room where the victim is being held. This time it’s a middle-aged Chinese American corporate type who’s been kidnapped at a conference in Cyprus but naively thinks he’s having a marathon lovemaking session with a beautiful woman. Sentro’s momentary hesitation about the room contributed to the mission going sideways, resulting in unintended bloodshed and something more in the aftermath: “She heard but couldn’t understand the voices, as if she were underwater.”

“Water Memory” is elevated from its genre moorings by the parallels it draws to classic seafaring literature, including “Lord Jim” (whose title character’s journey is echoed here) and even Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” excerpted for the novel’s epigraph. But neither that nor the well-placed and succinct flashbacks, illuminating the flash points in Sentro’s past that led her to this fateful moment, can distract a reader from the ripping good yarn Pyne has spun — or the prickly, endearing Aubrey Sentro, ugly scars and all.

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