This book made me really, really happy.
It’s not an awesome book, but it’s a good one, a solid one, one that bridged the gap between the DNF Pamela Clare and the “hey, this is pretty good” Pamela Clare.
Not surprisingly, this book sits squarely between the two in the Denver iTeam series.
Sophie Alton is the reporter on the iTeam who covers prisons, prisoners, all things jailbird-y. She’s been writing a series of stories about Megan, a recovering heroin addict and new mother, who has cleaned up her act while on parole, and is seeing her child for the first time since the baby was born in a prison hospital.
The bad news: it seems Megan took off with her kid during the “supervised” visit (ha).
The worse news: Sophie is lured to jail to interview Megan’s brother Marc Hunter (yep, he’s doing life for murdering a fellow DEA agent... a misunderstanding, natch) and he takes her hostage in order to escape from jail and find Megan, who he believes to be in a reasonably extreme amount of danger ("Mortal danger?" "Is there any other kind?").
The good news: It so happens that Marc Hunter is the mysterious bad boy known as “Hunt” from Sophie’s high school days, you know, the guy she gave her virginity to right before he left for the army.
OK. So the plot is not the strong suit in this one. Fortunately the characters and their relationship are. Over time, you see, neither Marc nor Sophie have forgotten That Night, and Marc happened to know exactly who he was luring to the jail, even if Sophie doesn’t recognize him until later.
There were plenty of times when I wanted to roll my eyes at things happening in this book. The whole lusting-after-the-captor thing is pretty played out (and ruined forever in both the good and bad way by Judith McNaught’s Perfect), but there were small ways in which this was redeemed. For example, for the last half of the book when Marc and Sophie are on the run together she is with him by choice, his having let her go, as promised, as soon as he was safely away.
It was also helpful that there was very little melodrama about “trust” and Sophie questioning whether Marc was a “good guy” or a “bad guy.”
The entire time he’s out, Marc is looking for his sister. And like a man who has been in prison for six years and separated from his sister for years before that, he has no effing idea where to look. There’s no magical connection, no “guy inside” who gave him clues and a road map-- Marc is literally at a loss, and so does what is reasonably the best thing he can do to find the information he is looking for.
I liked Sophie and Marc’s relationship a lot. They both have very fond memories of their one night together, and while the lead-up to that night is certainly abrupt, I didn’t doubt that that single memory would sustain him through prison, and her through various disastrous romances (and no, Sophie did not remain celibate in memory of his singularly amazing wang).
The twists were not so twisty, and the stuff peripheral to Sophie and Marc was occasionally annoying. But this was a solid romance with a (nearly) coherent plot, featuring neither a TSTL heroine nor a raging douchebag hero (At some point they’re arguing about her lack of discretion while they’re hiding out and he says “This isn’t about me controlling you; it’s about staying safe.” See?? He all but announces he’s not a douchebag).
All-in-all, I’m very glad to have read this book. It bridged a gap that needed to be bridged, and really made me excited to read Pamela Clare again.
No comments:
Post a Comment