Review by Frank Plowright

It been a long and unpredictable journey for assassin Joanna Tan and former CIA agent Brook. They’ve had to go on the run, and since Blood for Blood they’ve appeared in Heat Seeker, which broadened their world and the people in it. Collision Course opens a year later.

The span is relevant as a fixture of their world is Yamoto’s Vault. Yamoto is a keeper of confidential information that’s released to interested parties should he not hear from the client for longer than a year. It’s a form of insurance against assassination in the criminal world, but it seems someone’s keen to obtain the secrets Yamoto holds, and is both willing to breach understood protocol and to be extremely violent. Just as well Joanna and Brook are on hand.

A lurid exploitative cover in 1970s style tells no lies, so as with the previous volumes you’ll either be offended by Charles Ardai’s sensibilities in ensuring Joanna’s naked for roughly half the book, or that’s the reason you’ll be buying it in the first place. Ang Hor Keng’s art has developed from the first Gun Honey, now with greater flourish in the inking, but still retaining an incredible work rate for detail. Around midway through there’s page set amid some industrial machinery where the fixtures and fittings are astoundingly realised as Brook and Joanna skulk through them. He’s similarly enthusiastic when it comes to any form of transport.

Ardai guides the protagonists from one danger to the next and one location to the next, with the real surprise being near-naked martial arts. Collision Course sets to bed plots of deceit and betrayal running since the first volume stylishly and smoothly, leaving the remaining cast to pick up with a clean slate should the series continue.