This is one for the ‘Made Me Mad’ stack.
It is possibly the most implausible book I’ve ever read. It’s beyond ridiculous, and has a stupid, inconsistent heroine to boot.

I thought I would like this book. I’ve read the third one and liked it. I spent much of the time I was reading this book trying to convince myself I liked it, because I didn’t want to go below three stars with my rating. But it’s not the crazy story that earned it one star; it’s the fact this book made me furious. Over and over again.

I started this series out of order, which I learnt was a bad idea. You could try to read these as standalone novels, but they work a whole lot better when read as a trilogy. Some romantic suspense is emotional, moving, true to life, somehow relevant to us. Then there’s romantic suspense like this, which is like watching an over the top action movie and there solely for entertainment. You MUST suspend your disbelief, and you might enjoy it. I’ll read the others, but the cheesy cover should have warned me what I was in for.

So here, in dot points, is why this book earned one and only one star:

• The book got off to a terrible start.
Here’s how it played out:

The hero (Kick, yes, Kick) goes to a speed dating party for hospital staff, pretending to be his doctor friend. He goes with the intention of picking up a medically-trained woman so he can sleep with her, stay at her apartment for a few days, and have assistance going through withdrawal from drugs.
The hero ends up taking the woman/heroine (Lorraine/Rainie) back to her apartment by force – at gunpoint. He then kisses her even though she doesn’t want it, demands she get on the bed – while still pointing the gun at her – and produces a set of handcuffs. THEN he becomes furious with her for thinking he might want to hurt her!
Then they proceed to have sex for a number of hours.

• Rainie is then captured by ‘the good guys’ and forced to go on a major international, anti-terrorism mission with Kick. Why? Because they need a nurse to help Kick. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t one of the many multi-national organisations be able to provide a doctor or nurse who not only understood the situation, but also knew about weapons and terrorists and all the important stuff?! Preferably a man, so they didn’t have to spend the entire book worrying about Rainie being raped in the conservative, Islamic countries they visited? On top of that, are Special Forces and Black Ops men not trained in enough medical stuff to help Kick with his high blood pressure for Heaven’s sake?!

• In the first few chapters I thought it was going to be the hero I hated. Turned out it was the heroine. There are two kinds of heroine I can’t stand. Gun-toting She-Men, and innocent little idiots who becoming self-righteous little misses when the hero has to use violence to save them. This heroine had the worst of both worlds, morphing backwards and forwards between the two terrible types.
The book was very uneven in the characterisation of the women. Rainie in particular was all over the place. At the beginning she’s so traumatised by her parents’ murder in a carjacking that she can’t even get in a moving vehicle. She hates guns so much that even though she knows the hero spends time in the Middle East she’s shocked he might actually kill someone with all of those weapons he has.
Here’s a timeline of her stupidity:
#1 Having hours of sex with the man who’s holding her at gunpoint.
#2 Rainie knows Kick is a former military man who now works in the Middle East and North Africa, stopping terrorists. So what does she do when the terrorists show up at a village they are trying to trade with, and said terrorists start shooting the villagers? Well, of course she becomes furious with Kick for helping the villagers – stopping them being shot, and saving a young girl from being raped. HOW DARE HE fight the terrorists?! HOW DARE HE???!!! Because terrorists are people too, and deserving of her endless compassion. Path-Et-Ic.
#3 Kick tells the Sudanese villagers Rainie is his wife, to prevent her being raped or treated like a whore. Naturally, she becomes angry at him for doing that.
#4 Rainie suddenly decides she isn’t scared of moving vehicles anymore. A couple of days after having major panic attacks in a car, she decides that while the hero is sleeping she’ll drive the truck they stole through the desert for hours. And she does.
#5 They are attacked by more terrorists, and Rainie stabs one of them to death with a knife. She who hates violence, cars, guns, knives, men who aren’t doctors. So is she traumatised by killing someone for the first time? Nope, of course not. Are you crazy?! She’s OVERJOYED. Why? Because apparently committing her first kill has cured her of the trauma she’s been carrying around since she was a kid. Now that she’s killed a man she rides a camel with incredible expertise – while whistling the Lawrence of Arabia theme and grinning the whole time – and is no longer frightened of anything. This made me feel sick. Have an anxiety disorder? Murder someone and you'll be cured!!
#6 They reach the terrorist training camp (Al Qaeda by a different name). They’re there so Kick can assassinate an Osama Bin Laden wannabe. BUT! Rainie sees them praying and decides it’s wrong to kill such devout, principled men. Oh please.
#7 Don’t worry though. A few hours later the heroine is charging into the camp, guns blazing. SHE calls in an air strike. She who doesn’t even really know what an air strike is, let alone know the military lingo they use. She’s become She-Man. Or He-Ra. Or something. Remember, It’s only been a few days since she was a timid little idiot who hadn’t been ten blocks from her workplace in years (because she couldn’t get in a car). Now she’s Rainie-Ra, international terrorism fighter extraordinaire. That’s too much suspension of disbelief even for me – the reader who loves some crazy stuff.

• So, all of that leads me to the question; why in the hell was it left up to a couple of men to set up and complete such a major international anti-terrorist operation? How was it possible Rainie just ‘had to’ be there with them, and continue with them? Why was it a highly-trained, unbelievably experienced military/CIA operative was dividing the workload with a silly little self-righteous nurse from Manhattan? I’m sorry, but it was so implausible. I really, really tried to suspend my disbelief. I couldn’t. It was too much.

• One week after Miss Panic Attack couldn’t even get in a taxi in Manhattan, she has this to say about flying on an aeroplane from Egypt to the USA:
“Actually, I enjoyed it. Seeing all those clouds below was unreal. And the little fields and houses and cars. An amazing sight.”

• Using CAPITALISED terms such as “STORM” twelve times on one page is just plain annoying.

• I have read Gregg and Gina’s story in the third book, so it was good to see their side story here. But I’m glad I knew a bit more about Gina already, as she doesn’t come across as a very appealing character in this one.

• I can’t stand books that introduce characters with, “Merv was five-two and three hundred pounds, had dark brown hair to his shoulders and fluorescent pink eyes.” But I also can’t stand books that don’t give us any details until we’re in the middle of the story. We aren’t told the heroine’s hair colour until page 109, which was about a hundred pages too late for me. The woman on the awful, tacky cover has brown hair, and coupled with nothing in the text to go by, I got over a hundred pages in and then had to completely change my idea of how she looked. I hate that.

• In one chapter, Gina brags about her FBI ex-fiancé. A few chapters later, she wonders how Gregg knows her ex-fiancé is in the FBI. Gee Gina…I wonder how… Through the whole book she congratulates herself on being such a smart woman, but she does very little to demonstrate that.

• It was working its way towards a 2 or 2.5 star, but then the author pulled the ultimate ‘piss me off’ card and turned her French character into the Devil Incarnate. He’s only in the book for two appearances of about four seconds each. The first time he proves the hero’s superiority by not stealing the heroine’s affections. The second time he arrives at the terrorist camp just long enough to be EEEEEVIL EUROTRASH (the author’s word, not mine).
I'm surprised she didn't give him a beret and a moustache. I certainly lost a lot of respect for the author then.
I am so bloody sick of English-speaking authors demonising French characters. You know what? Of all the countries I’ve spent time in, the French are the nicest!!!!
These days you know to assume that the second a French character walks onto the page the author’s going to make him turn on his friends. Gee, what a surprise! Grrr. I saw it coming from a mile off. Even if it wasn’t a pet peeve of mine, it’s been done to death. How about negatively stereotyping another nation for once?!
On the plus side, at least there weren’t any blonde jokes in this one. Then I would really be mad.

• There was far too much time spent talking about, riding, thinking about and trading for camels. Far too much.

• The book ends with a “Buy my next book!!!!” cliffhanger to end them all. I didn’t appreciate that.

So, even if you personally loved this book, surely you can see why I didn’t. ( )