I wondered what crime a professional killer could commit that his closest friends would find unforgivable.

It is the mid-1980s and Barbara Kemp shatters another glass ceiling as she becomes the US babysitter for Charlemagne, the premier freelance specialist team used by Western governments for black operations conducted without fingerprints. She arrives in-country for her first assignment in support of an allied government.

An American officer is being used as bait to lure a deep-cover IRA explosives expert into the light where Charlemagne will eliminate him — if they do not annihilate each other first. Barbara must deal with mystifying lunacy in the dangerous men around her while she struggles to find a way to save the American bait, the operation, and the team itself.

Will this promotion be the end of Barbara’s career? Or the end of her life?

Lion Tamer is the fourth novel in K.A. Bachus’s fast-paced Charlemagne Files series chronicling the lives of a team of deadly Cold War intelligence operatives over three decades.