Up Close and Personal

By Joseph Nicola

The Ice Queen never misses. But someone inside her own organization is aiming for her.

When UMBRA operative Judi "Ice" Krcha eliminates a terrorist in the Jordanian desert, she expects the familiar weight of mission accomplished. What she doesn't expect is the photograph in his wallet - a smiling wife, two daughters in matching dresses - and the realization that the greatest threat to everything she loves may not be the enemies she hunts, but the institution she serves.

Up Close and Personal is a women's fiction thriller following Judi Krcha, as she fights simultaneous battles on multiple fronts - a corruption network dismantling her organization from within, a custody challenge weaponized against her by the very people she trusted, and the grinding institutional war of a woman doing extraordinary work in a world that keeps asking her to make herself smaller.

Krcha is a woman built for impossible situations. Single mother. Elite assassin. The only person in the room who is always underestimated and never wrong. But when a five-million-dollar bounty appears on her head and surveillance photos of her ten-year-old daughter arrive as a threat, Ice discovers that the skills that made her legendary in the field may not be enough to protect the people she loves most. The only mission that ever truly mattered was the one happening around her dinner table - and she's been absent for most of it.

Told with unflinching honesty about gender bias and institutional misogyny, Up Close and Personal will resonate with readers who recognized themselves fighting a quiet daily war that every exceptional woman knows: proving her worth in a system designed to minimize her. It is both a propulsive thriller and an intimate portrait of a woman reclaiming herself on her own terms.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFTXYJM2
• ISBN13: 9798193751243
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 141 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"