Between The Lines

                                                              Hunted

Author: Karen Robards

Performed by Cassandra Campbell/MacLeod Andrews

Released: December 2013 by Brilliance Audio

Category: Romantic Suspense

"Caroline Wallace is one of New Orleans Police Department's top hostage negotiators, and she's never failed to get every hostage out alive. But this time, it's different: the hostages include her father - the superintendent of police - and the mayor. And this time, she's trying to negotiate with Reed Ware, a former co-worker who left the force in disgrace, and who is considered to be volatile and extremely dangerous.

As police snipers arrive on the scene, Caroline has only a few moments left to persuade the hot-headed, reckless (and extremely handsome) Reed to turn himself in before anyone gets hurt. But when the SWAT team runs out of patience and launches an attack, Reed manages to escape - taking Caroline hostage in the chaos. He then tells her he's uncovered corruption at the highest levels of the police department and city government, and those involved will stop at nothing to keep him from exposing what he knows . . . including murder.

Now Caroline must question everything she thought she knew about her job and her city and join Reed on the run . . . putting both her life - and her heart - in jeopardy."

 

 

The story concept was an interesting one and promised suspense and action, or so I thought. NOPD detective Reed Ware finds out about corruption and murder in the police force and the next thing we know he’s holding the city’s main players to ransom. The hostage negotiator, Caroline, gets taken hostage herself. What happened to make Reed flip? Caroline had a teenage crush on Reed and can’t understand why he’s turned into someone who, she believes, will blow up a roomful of people if his demands aren’t met. She needs to find out what’s going on and as the plot unfolds Caroline begins to believe Reed is innocent and all is not as it should be in the NOPD.

The start of the story was exciting as was the end and the police corruption/murder scenario could have been a good one but the majority of the book was taken up with the steamy romance between Reed and Caroline and had hardly any storyline. Had I realised I wouldn’t have chosen this title.

There were far too many long and repetitive scenes describing how their bodies looked, felt and reacted to each other. Total overkill. So much ‘pulse racing’ and ‘heart pounding’ and ‘going up in flames’ from Caroline’s perspective I was quite surprised she actually survived to end of the book. No matter what the danger all Caroline and Reed seem able to think about is sex. Leaving to rescue the two boys he has time to give her flowers before they set off and they have a moment or several before they get back to the problem at hand.

"Under the circumstances it was a sad state of affairs when just looking at her made him hot"

 

I’m not a huge fan of dual narrations, although some do work, not with each narrator just reading chapters and not the male/female parts though. Since this was written in the third person, I think it would have been better with one narrator. Having said that, MacLeod Andrews’ New Orleans accent seemed spot on to me, as were his characterisations, especially that of Reed. The emotional inflection was strong and left me in no doubt of each characters feelings. I wasn’t fond of Cassandra Campbell’s Reed, she gave him a mocking quality which didn’t seem right. Her other characterisations were good though.