Ride it Out by Cara McKeena (Desert Dogs #4)
Romantic Suspense
Released: September 19, 2017
Intermix
Reviewed by Mandi
This has been an up and down series for me. I liked book one and two quite a bit, I didn’t care for book three and this one ended up being just okay. It starts strong. Jeremiah Church, who goes by Miah is still reeling from his father’s murder. His father was killed, and then the barn he was in was set on fire, to make it look like an arson. The druggie hired to kill him, died in an overdose before he could talk to the police. Miah is desperate to find out who hired this guy to kill his father, but the police have no leads.
Patrol Deputy Nicki Ritchey just moved to town, and she has picked up the case to see if she can uncover anything new. Her father was murdered when she lived in Chicago, so she knows the pain of losing a loved one to violence. Nicki and Miah bond over that – and the fact that he is super attracted to her. Miah has never had time for serious girlfriends and the thought of settling down seems so far away to him. When Miah realizes the weight of his father’s murder is becoming too much for him, he calls Nicki to talk to her as a friend. She is willing to listen and let him unload. Soon though, they are doing much more than just being friends.
I really liked Miah and Nicki in this book. They are both mature and not whiny or overly dramatic. While Miah is willing to take risks and hang out with people in his town who might not be 100% moral, he is a good guy who is grieving and finds comfort and intimacy with Nicki. Nicki is black, and her son is the only black person in his new school. He is having trouble with that and since Miah is half Native American-half white, he too had issues in school with the color of his skin. Miah takes her son under his wing and gives him chores to do on the ranch, to make his transition to his new town easier. Nicki sees this and her feelings for Miah grow even more.
They both proclaim they are looking for passion – and while there are steamy sex scenes, I don’t know if I would call their romance passionate. I guess the build up of sexual tension isn’t really there – they just kind of start with a physical relationship right away. I liked them together, but it kind of felt like there was the make-out session, then the actual sex scene, then maybe one more sex scene and then the book was over. It felt a little rehearsed.
The suspense in this started strong, with Miah kind of becoming a vigilante and meeting up with sketchy druggie people in town to see if he can nail down who hired the guy who killed his father. I felt a little let down by how it all ended. It wasn’t really that exciting.
So this was just a middle of the road book. I’m sorry to see the series ending because I feel like this town has a lot of interesting characters in it.
If you would like a recommendation, book two of this series, Give it All, features a OCD, anxiety-ridden, stone-cold lawyer who I loooooved. The suspense however is tied into book one, so I’m not sure how well it would read as a stand alone.
Grade: C
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