Relay Publishing, $2.99, ISBN 978-1386212478
Romantic Suspense, 2018
Leslie North makes me laugh just from the opening of Ride With the SEAL.
Camden Thursday was over-prepared, as usual.
Still, despite hours of memorizing code and enough binary hacks to make his eyeballs explode, nothing could have prepared him for what he was looking at now. Sure, he’d expected the tech in the Aeon Turbo G90 to be mind-blowingly impressive—given it was the most advanced vehicle on the roadways today and the federal government had the only prototype in the world. Or at least they had until the damned thing had been stolen and ended up here at Knight’s Body and Repair—quite possibly the seediest garage in Washington, D.C. What he hadn’t expected, however, was the female mechanic apparently trying to hijack the thing out from under his nose at two in the morning.
There’s no such thing as “binary hacks”, and one doesn’t memorize codes for hours to hack into things. Hacking isn’t simply remembering the right combination of numbers, symbols, and letters, sheesh—that would be trying to log into some app that one hasn’t used in a long, long time.
Our hero is supposed to be the brainiest ex-SEAL that ever SEAL-ed, mind you, so I can only imagine his superiors were tech illiterates that were awed that Camden manages to log into his email in a single try. That proves that he is a tech genius!
Anyway, while breaking into the garage to retrieve the prototype, he encounters the sexy mechanic Everly Knight. Her daddy is a mobster but she’s just a misunderstood feisty darling yearning for her own garage and for Camden to park his red-hot Ferrari inside for a long, long, long time. Okay, she steals cars to fund her dreams, but that’s okay. Those guys in the Fast and Furious franchise used to steal things, too, and they are the good guys!
It’s too much work to have the hero and the heroine get to know one another from scratch, as romance authors are busy people with 845 titles to release every month, so Camden was the nerd from Everly’s school days. To kick start the romance, she jumps into the car just as Camden is about to rev it up and go, pleading at him to take her along—not at all like what the official synopsis said—and soon her daddy’s goons are hot on their heels.
I hope I haven’t made the story seem exciting, because it actually isn’t. Like way too many romantic suspense stories out there, in this one it soon becomes apparent that all the romantic suspense gobbledygook is just an excuse to get the hero and the heroine running around in close proximity, the better for their body bits to eventually bump into one another.
I like that the heroine isn’t some wilted lily that needs rescuing, even more when she displays some confidence in her own abilities. She can hold her own against the hero very well, and that’s one nice aspect of this story.
However, this one is a romantic suspense, or at least it is marketed as one, and the “suspense” part is noticeably missing. Not once am I convinced that the hero and the heroine are in even a little danger.
It doesn’t help that these two are far more focused on exchanging sarcastic quips with one another instead of showing concern about their own safety. The whole banter system feels more at home in an action comedy, but this story never gets over the top enough to be a convincing comedy. It’s just a road trip story supposedly full of danger that the characters never seem too concerned about, and the whole thing is one big tonal mismatch.
Still, I’m willing to forgive because the author ends the final chapter on a perfect note with the perfect closing paragraph…
… only for her to completely ruin the high with an unnecessarily sappy and pointless epilogue just to show me that these two are able to have children.
All in all, this one is readable, although some chunks of it have me thinking that perhaps the author served up the good bits by accident instead of by design.
