James-York Press, $2.99, ISBN 978-1-938732-26-3
Romantic Suspense, 2018
Romantic suspense and thrillers are two different genres, and normally I shouldn’t expect the former to be the same as the latter. It is hard, however, not to question the sanity of the characters involved when these people would, because the genre demands it, get distracted by the tingling feeling in their groins when they should be vigilant or scared.
Hence, I do a big eye roll early on in Marliss Melton’s Strike Back when the heroine Hilary Alcorn, after working long past midnight, suspects that she’s being trailed by a car on her drive home, only to shrug it off and start daydreaming about the hero Stuart Randolph instead.
He’d come into her life when she was still working for her friend and private investigator, Juliet Rhodes. Finding a spy from the Cold War era based on his composite alone had stymied both Hilary and Juliet, so they’d called on a friend of Juliet’s Navy SEAL boyfriend, a man so good at finding information online his SEAL buddies called him Hack.
Sure, the author needs to dump a whole lot of back story on me, but I still believe she could do it a more elegant manner than having the heroine press her foot on the accelerator while doing a Wikipedia entry to herself and hence, me. What if the silly acorn lose control of her car and fly off the road or, worse, hit someone else?
Anyway, some of their backstory happen in some previous story that I haven’t read, but the gist of it is that Stuart doesn’t want to crack the acorn, so Hilary decides to date the hot new neighbor, Elias Malki, who just happens to be in the vehicle that she suspects was trailing her earlier.
Then Stuart shows up, saying that she can’t give Elias any honey as that man is, ooh, a terrorist. Really, this guy dumps her because he claims that he is not good enough for her, and now he’s going to ruin her chances at hooking up with any other man. What a hero!
Okay, this is a short-ish story, so I’ll keep this short as well: Hilary, for someone working in National Counterterrorism Center, is so stupid and naïve, being led around by both Elias and Stuart that I can only wonder whether the recruitment people hired her to fulfill some DEI quota for the mentally challenged.
Then, I remember that is a romantic suspense, so I suppose I’m to go all “Aww! That silly darling!” at the heroine and just swoon because finally she’s getting the pee-pee of her dreams and it’s a happy ending. All that terrorist plot thing is just a filler to push the heroine back onto the pee-pee where she belongs.
Oh, and here’s a shocker: the serious competition for the heroine’s affection is not her true love. I suppose at least the author deserves some credit for not adding the bloke to the list of future sequel baits.
This one is too well-written to be anything worse than a three-oogie read, but it also comes with it the awful cringe fest that is the heroine being a dumb dumb and the author being well aware of this.
In other words, this is another romantic suspense story designed from scratch to be powered by the heroine’s subpar mental faculties—if the acorn dummy had been any less gullible, this story wouldn’t be as long as it is. Worse, the author makes this wretch a staff of some intelligence agency.
I may be more charitable to the nitwit heroine had she been the staple romance genre storekeeper or flailing big city idiot stumbling into a small town, but no, the author wants me to believe that Hilary is somehow capable of hanging with spies and agents despite having less brainpower than a shambling drunk.
Three oogies, but at least 30 gallons of reservations on my part. Really, skip this thing if you have low tolerance for nitwits driving the plot with their sub-optimal brainpower and lots of plot contrivances.
