Tara Wolfe Thrillers Books in Order

The Tara Wolfe thrillers spin out of the Gabriel Wolfe universe, focusing on his long lost sister and the years she spent far from the family that believed she was dead. As a baby, Tara Wolfe was kidnapped by Hong Kong triads during a botched ransom attempt and secretly taken to mainland China. Renamed Wei Mei, she grows up in a poor rural village, raised by an English speaking carer she calls Mummy Rita, with no idea of her true origins.

Purity Kills opens in that village, where Mei has learned to survive with a mix of toughness and quick wits. When armed men arrive looking for her, she runs to the sprawling megacity of Shenzhen and a precarious life on the streets. A chance encounter, in which she fights off three rich youths who try to assault her, brings her to the attention of a talent scout for a secretive Communist Party school.

The school is no ordinary academy. Its purpose is to train deniable operatives and assassins for the Party. Mei endures brutal physical conditioning, weapons drills and psychological manipulation designed to strip away any loyalty but the one the Party demands. She does, however, find two allies in fellow students nicknamed Rats and Sis, forming a tight trio in a place where trust is dangerous.

As the story unfolds, Mei is troubled by dreams and flickers of memory that do not fit the life she remembers. Snatches of English, images of a different home and a sense that someone, somewhere, is missing her begin to surface. At the same time, foreign intelligence services take an interest in the school and in Mei herself, seeing potential in a talented young assassin with no publicly known identity.

After an especially punishing field exercise, events tear Mei’s small circle apart and deepen the Party’s hold on her. She uncovers a secret about who she really is that makes any return to a normal life seem impossible. The knowledge that she was stolen, not abandoned, changes the way she views both her handlers and the people she loves.

Determined to protect Mummy Rita and reclaim control over her own future, Mei hatches a desperate escape plan. With only hours before she is moved to a secure facility in Beijing where her fate will be sealed, she has to outwit both her instructors and the foreign agents circling the school. The Tara Wolfe stories combine coming of age elements, Chinese political intrigue and the kinetic action of the Gabriel Wolfe books, showing how a stolen child grows into a woman who refuses to be anyone’s weapon for long.