Mini-Reviews: Bad Men and Resourceful Women

Why yes, I do have a bazillion neglected ARCs but why should that stop me from checking out books from the library or dipping into my TBR?  I've been on a bit of a suspense jag for the last month and with these two latest, mostly ho-hum reads, I think I might be ready to pull myself back into romance.  Time will tell.

One of the great tragedies of my romance reading life is when Harlequin killed the SuperRomance line. Janice Kay Johnson was one of my favorites and always worth reading for her skill in crafting dynamite conflict.  So the move to suspense intrigued (ha!) me - given that I always thought Harlequin would have been smart to repackage some of her Supers as "book club fiction" (but since when do publishers listen to Wendy?).  Anyway, true to JKJ form, the conflict in Dead in the Water is dynamite.  The rest of it?  Meh.

Claire Holland is on a kayaking trip in the Pacific Northwest when her BFF, Mike, is gunned down by drug runners. Claire's lagging behind, so the bad guys didn't see her and they shot Mike with zero provocation. Claire's terror increases when she spies the bad guys shooting another man on their boat, and dumping him overboard.  She can't just leave a man to die, even if he was with the men who murdered Mike, so when their boat takes off, she pulls Adam Taylor from the water - saving him from hypothermia.

Adam, naturally, is an undercover DEA agent.  He had the nerve to question the man who shot Mike and that's how he almost ended up dead. Now to figure out how to get back to civilization when all he has is a female civilian and a dead man's kayak at his disposal. Never mind his injuries and the small matter that he doesn't know how to kayak.  Oh, and that the bad guys are coming back around to ensure he's well and truly dead.

I love survival stories and that's pretty much what carried me through this book.  It sounds exciting, but the execution lacks urgency, which in the short, snappy Intrigue line is a problem.  There's a lot of kayak talk, Claire and Adam making camp and staying hidden - heck, even reading books to pass the time.  The romance also lacks punch.  I liked both Adam and Claire as people, but other than surviving the wilderness and escaping the clutches of the bad guys, there's not a ton of chemistry here.  I've certainly read worse, but JKJ has also certainly written better.

Final Grade = C

Save Me from Dangerous Men is S.A. Lelchuk's debut novel and features Nikki Griffin, bookseller, private eye, and avenging badass.  Nikki loves books, and collected so many over the years that opening a bookstore seemed natural.  So did the private eye thing - given a traumatic past that lands her in court-ordered therapy.  Which is where we find her in this book. Seeing a therapist, selling books, taking adultery cases (so many naughty married men out there....) and occasionally rescuing battered women by giving their abusers exactly what is coming to them.  The publisher's marketing team describes Nikki as a mix of Lisbeth Salander, Jack Reacher and Jessica Jones, and that's fairly apt. So let's go with that.

Anyway, Nikki is based in Oakland, California and makes the boneheaded move accepting a job from a start-up tech company's CEO.  He has an employee, Karen Li, who needs following.  He knows she's stealing company secrets and wants Nikki to find out who her buyers are.  But almost immediately Nikki smells something rotten in Denmark.  Karen Li doesn't act like a woman selling corporate secrets.  No, Karen Li looks like a woman who is terrified for her life.

There's a good story here, but it lacks something in the execution department.  Lelchuk flits the narrative between Nikki's bookstore gig, the corporate espionage job, a philandering husband job, beating the tar out of domestic abusers, enabling her junkie brother, a new guy she's dating, and her traumatic past.  It takes forever for the author to get around to character development and backstory and once he does it comes out info-dumpy.  Also, I'm a pretty basic suspense fan - I'm generally here for the, you know, suspense. The author faffs about too much when, for my money, more time should have been spent on the questionable surveillance job of Karen Li.

Now, that said - the Bay Area setting is well done and the corporate espionage story set against the backdrop of Silicon Valley grossness is extremely timely.  Nikki is part "too smart for her own good" mixed with "catch on quicker sweetheart," but I'm a sucker for a good avenging angel storyline and that's certainly Nikki.  I wasn't madly in love with this, but there was definitely enough on the page to get me to read book 2.

Final Grade = C+