Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-61923-262-4
Romantic Suspense, 2016
Is that Zac Efron on the cover? I hope not, I can’t stand that juiced-up wannabe.
Anyway, let me talk about Jett Munroe’s In the Line of Fire.
Delaney Murphy has always had a crush on Beck “Gravedigger” Townsend.
She has self-esteem issues, but she thinks she has overcome them.
Beck is a Marine special ops who now works for a security firm called Red Eagle Group.
She finds him very hot, and she’d like to have sex with him.
He finds her very hot, and he’d like to have sex with her too.
But he doesn’t believe that he is capable of love, and he doesn’t want to put her in danger.
She gets laid off, though, so Beck gets her to work at Red Eagle Group so that he can keep an eye on her.
After all, the world is a dangerous place. A woman needs her man to protect her.
There is danger afoot. He has to protect her from harm, or die trying.
Yes, the entire story is written in the above manner. By page 50, I feel like tearing my hair out because the author – who also writes as Sherrill Quinn and Cynthia Garner – seems to have developed some kind of annoying addiction to short active sentences, so much so that she can’t vary the tone and nuances of her sentences anymore. This one is frightfully dreary to read as a result, and I still have no idea how I managed to reach the end of this one.
The hero is as dull as can be – he is, after all, a standard archetype of this sort, all mope and brawn, but the heroine drives me nuts. She talks and acts like an immature brat desperate for attention, and she acts like the hero having to go to work and doing his thing is a great act of betrayal. If he loves her, he’s supposed to stay by her side always and adore her! If reading this book feels like an interminable torture, then the romance here feels like a very brief trainwreck in the making.
With the author going about as if someone is threatening to kill her puppy if she didn’t write a sleeping aid for insomniacs, In the Line of Fire is more akin to in the line of dire. Add in the idiot heroine and dumping one’s head into a pot of boiling water seems like a more pleasant activity in comparison. On the bright side, this is a reusable sleeping pill – for only $5.50!
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