This is one of those Silhouette Romantic Suspense novels, in this case heavy on the suspense and not so much on the romance, although it’s definitely there. The heroine is a police sniper for a SWAT team in a California city, and the book opens with her trying to stop an assassin from killing a visiting dignitary, the president of the South American nation of San Baltes (“a fictional but real-sounding country”, to quote Woody Allen from WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY). She’s recruited to join a private security company hired to protect the president and immediately gets caught in the middle of an on-going feud between the head of the company (a former Navy SEAL who’s the hero of the book) and a powerful official with the Department of Homeland Security.The action switches to San Baltes, where we get more assassination attempts, corrupt politicians, drug cartels, kidnappings, explosions, and plenty of jungle action, to the point where this novel almost begins to resemble a Mack Bolan adventure, although it never gets quite that bloody. There’s only one real twist in the plot, and it’s not hard to see it coming, but the story is well-paced enough to pull the reader on to the end.
As usual in a romance, the hero and heroine both have dark secrets in their past that make it difficult for them to connect, but when they do, the book’s lone sex scene is well-written. Brant’s prose is terse and hardboiled in the action scenes. Overall, TERMS OF ATTRACTION is a pretty entertaining novel and worth your time if you’re a fan of romantic suspense yarns.
5 comments:
I really admire the fact that I never know what book or movie I might find here. You are an open-minded reader/viewer.
So is this one that you or your wife wrote? :)
Brian,
Nope, neither of us had anything to do with this one. I haven't actually written any romances, although I've edited and helped plot some of the ones Livia's done.
The mention of SEALs and whatnot makes me wonder if this isn't one of Merline Lovelace's. Then again, while looking up what else she's written before "All the Wrong Moves" I noticed that she was part of a group of ex-military romance writers so this could easily be one of them.
I've picked up another mystery book by what would seem to be a new writer, Mary Kennedy, only to find in her back cover bio that she's already written 50 books!
According to the copyright page, Kylie Brant is really Kimberly Bahnsen.
If you ever run across a copy of Merline Lovelace's Silhouette Nocturne novel MIND GAMES, I thought it was a good one and well worth reading. Very fast-paced book.
The best series romantic suspense novel I've ever read, though, is Marsha Canham's DARK AND DANGEROUS, which was part of the Harlequin Temptation line. It's the only contemporary by Canham, who's a fine historical romance novelist, and it's the proverbial book that reads like the wind.
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