Exchange of Fire by P.A. DePaul
Released: August 19, 2014
Romantic Suspense
Penguin
Reviewed by Mandi
Blurb: Faking her death was easy, living with her past is harder, but nothing is more dangerous than falling in love…
Sandra Walsh was a deadly sniper for the Sweet Briar Group, a covert agency with assassins for hire, until her last mission went horribly wrong, accidentally killing an innocent girl. Knowing she’s a danger to her team, Sandra goes off the grid, becoming a Shade—an agent declared dead but secretly hiding among the living. She intends to honor her vow never to pull another trigger or have contact with the spy world again. Until she meets Casper Grady…
Grady is a former Marine with a troubled past and a debt to pay. His life mission has gone from protecting the nation to helping local children and their families. The moment he meets Sandra, he knows there’s more to her than meets the eye, but he can’t help but be drawn to the mysterious femme fatale. And when Sandra’s past suddenly catches up to her, Grady is determined to protect her at all costs, no matter how dark and dangerous her secrets are.
As the danger increases, so does their intense attraction. But when they’re forced to choose between each other and the people they’ve sworn to protect, their growing love might not be enough to keep them together—or alive…
I decided to read this one because the heroine is a secret sniper assassin – I couldn’t let that pass me by. But unfortunately, she wasn’t quite as bad ass as I wanted her to be. Sandra Walsh works for a super secret non government agency under the front of a big environmental company. Her team is called Delta Squad and they are all extremely close. But when they are in Mexico, trying to rescue young girls sold into a prostitution, Sandra accidentally shoots and kills a fourteen year old girl. Unable to move past her guilt, Sandra fakes her death and escapes, allowing her teammates to think she is dead.
Six months later, Sandra is living in North Carolina, working as an operations manager for a large activity/amusement center for kids. She loves her job and gets along very well with her former marine boss, Grady. But when the bad guys get a lead on where Sandra might be, she needs to flee. Except, Grady won’t let her. He ends up with her and gets deeply involved with Sandra’s drama.
That’s the super brief set-up to this book. I don’t want to go into too much detail because there are a lot of secrets and twists that you can discover on your own. But let me also say, these secrets and twists muddle up the story. There are a lot of characters in this book. We get points of view from several characters and it made the story confusing, especially at the beginning. There are a lot of times where we see characters and the author doesn’t give us their name in the scene because she doesn’t want the reader to know quite yet who they are (or if they are bad or good). While this can be fun, I found it confusing and had to go back to read those scenes again once I figured out who the characters were. Also, I like to spend time with the villain in romantic suspense books, but there are multiple could-be villains in this one and I didn’t need to have every single point of view. It was too much.
Onto the romance, there is a big case of telling but not showing. Grady is in love with Sandra when this book opens, but he has yet to tell her. Sandra is pretty in love with Grady too. But that all happened off-page. They have some good sexual tension, but when they first admit feelings for each other and have some admittedly hot sex, the circumstances are not great. They are both trying to manipulate information out of the other, so it wasn’t necessarily genuine. Later, Grady has a hot dream sex sequence (I don’t like dream sex). Otherwise, these two aren’t really together. I never see why they fall in love, or why they are attracted to each other. We are just told that part. It’s tricky in suspense books to have a balanced romance vs suspense – in this book, the suspense wins out. I never felt the two of them belonged together. I’d rather have her end up with one of her teammates who she has great chemistry with (like Talon! I loved him). Her teammates bring a lot to this book. All with code names, Talon, Romeo, Magician – I enjoyed all of their scenes. They were much more likable than the hero unfortunately.
Sandra could have been a super cool bad ass assassin, but she spends a lot of time with the guilt of killing the teenager and then the guilt of abandoning her team, and then guilt about lying to Grady. Girlfriend. You are a sniper assassin. Get it together! *kicks her in the butt*
This book has some great action scenes and hot sex. But for all the reasons I gave above, it didn’t quite do it for me. Maybe if Talon gets a book, I’ll read for his happily ever after.
Rating: C
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