The First Mistake by Merline Lovelace released on Apr 12, 2005 is available now for purchase.

When a young woman vanishes without a trace, former special agent Cleo North is hired to find her. But cold trail after cold trail lead to nowhere, until Major Jack Donovan—special agent with the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations and the on-again, off-again man in Cleo's life—joins the case. Soon they are trying to determine why a lowly employee had access to engineering schematics of a ship carrying dangerous cargo. When the evidence leads them to Malta, they uncover a massive threat with international consequences. Absolutely nothing is as it seems—and time is running out for them to find the key to a terrorist's deeply hidden sins.

Former special agent Cleo North thought she had sworn off bureaucracy forever—but the Air Force Office of Special Investigation has other ideas. They need her expertise and are willing to pay her extravagant fee. The case? An off-duty U.S. fighter pilot recently took a bullet under suspicious circumstances and wound up dead. It doesn't take long before Cleo and Major Jack Donovan from the OSI—along with some help from British Intelligence—discover the pilot was involved in some questionable activities. But why was he so interested in a U.S. Army Corps C-46 that went down in the English Channel in 1943? When another murder links a far-fetched story of wartime international intrigue to millions of dollars in gold, only one question remains: who is behind the ultimate cover-up? And could Cleo be the next bullet's victim?