Tessa Carr, $4.99, ISBN 978-1393815648
Romantic Suspense, 2021

When Tessa Carr’s Danger in Shadow opens, our heroine Laurie Lancey is almost run down in the prologue by a speeding black SUV. Ooh, it’s a black SUV so it must be evil! 

Anyway, our heroine feels “violated”, because that’s what people feel when they are almost killed. Not fear, just “Ugh! I feel violated!”

Then, it’s chapter one and it’s the next day. Laurie is on a blind date.

Wait, so the author transitions from a dramatic prologue to… this? This is like a shark movie opening with the obligatory bimbo skinny dipping into the sea only to be devoured a shark before going into a sitcom opening credit. 

Anyway, our heroine wants out of the date because the man is a nerdy scientist. She says that he is narcissist because he talks only about himself. Mind you, she’s not even talking, so perhaps he feels the need to say something just to fill the silence for all I know.

Perhaps sensing how I am giving the heroine the side eye and wishing that the black SUV will drive by again when Laurie is crossing the road, the author quickly ramps Hal up to be a cartoon screechy loser that barks at Laurie for not paying attention to him. Considering that her supposed good friends introduced her to him, I’m starting to think that such friendship is probably one-sided and they send over a psycho to kill her so that she won’t bug them anymore.

Anyway, she and Hal are dating at some Chinese restaurant, so she breaks open her fortune cookie and oh no, it tells her to take cover and prepare just as bullets start flying all over the place and I start laughing hysterically because this story is nonsensical and yet hilarious in a dumb way.

After having two near-death experiences in two days, Laurie feels annoyed that her blind date seems to have fled the scene. Sure, she has nothing but unpleasant thoughts about him, but still, how dare he flees from an unpleasant grouch like her!

Fortunately, our hero Nick Allyn is an action man that just happens to be nearby to save her, and she starts giving him sass for daring to tell her what to do in order to remain safe.

Someone please remind the author that the heroine has survived two near-death encounters in two days. Is everyone trying to kill Laurie every day that she has become desensitized to fear?

Anyway, she doesn’t know Nick, but it turns out that her BFFs are all married to Nick’s friends! This is where the author interrupts this scene of high tension to pitch an ad:

“Highway patrol? Then you must know some of them. Mitch Spencer and Ben Batten. And Logan Smith. Actually, they aren’t my friends; their wives are.”

I can go on and on, pointing out the stupidity running rampant on every page of this thing, but come on, I will still be doing this at the same day and month next year had this been the case. Indeed, all the above are found in the first two pages, and there are so many pages here.

The heroine is horrible—she has very few kind thoughts about anyone and everyone, and she displays only two different emotional range here: bitter and crybaby. Laurie has no sense of survival or even remotely human reaction to terrifying scenarios that keep befalling her—everything is an excuse for her to get mean and bitchy, to the point that the whole “everyone’s out to kill her” thing becomes an unintentionally meta reference to my feeling about this unripe pineapple of a wretch. 

Oh yes, the heroine cries quite a bit here because once she decides that she’s in love with the guy, or so the author tells me, she starts getting weepy because her Calamity Jane impersonation is inconveniencing him, so oh, that’s so sad, sob sob. Ugh.

Nothing about the heroine’s reaction to people wanting to kill her is believable even a bit, and as a result, the story resembles a cartoon only without fun superheroes or fantastical elements to justify the complete lack of fear or survival instinct on the heroine’s part.

So, all in all, as a romantic suspense, this one is an epic fail, not just because the heroine is an unlikable wretch that makes me root for her death. It’s also because Laurie treats the whole thing like an inconvenient excuse to whine and complain about the weirdest things that disconnect herself, and hence myself, even further from the plot. 

If there is any justification for the existence of this utter failure in every way, it’s that this thing stands tall and proud as an example of what not to do when writing a romantic suspense.