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Title: Flashpoint
Author: Suzanne Brockman
Genre: Contemporary romance/thriller
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A mission in an Afghanistan-analogue brings two former colleagues back together after an awkward one-night stand.
Thoughts: This was so close in so many ways. An interesting set-up, fairly likeable characters, decent dialogue.
But it's also a miss at a bunch of critical points. Some minor spoilers: there's an enormous looming Chekov's gun that never goes off. There's a rather anti-climatic confrontation with the head bad guy. There's a minor character who literally gets forgotten and has to be gone back for, I think basically because the author herself forget, since the "going-back" part is so perfunctory. There's the second book in a row where the big tough operative literally passes out when he thinks something has happened to his romantic interest.
But most importantly, most of the romantic tension depends on people misreading each other in really implausible ways. I've now had a couple books in a row that I've read in which we hear characters' thought processes and it seems to me the only reason someone would interpret a situation the way each does is because the author needed them to. They repeatedly assume the worst when there's no good reason to do so. And it got old, fast. Especially when these misunderstandings were mostly cleared up in anticlimactic ways. Really, for a book with so much tension, the climax was surprisingly flat.
Author: Suzanne Brockman
Genre: Contemporary romance/thriller
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A mission in an Afghanistan-analogue brings two former colleagues back together after an awkward one-night stand.
Thoughts: This was so close in so many ways. An interesting set-up, fairly likeable characters, decent dialogue.
But it's also a miss at a bunch of critical points. Some minor spoilers: there's an enormous looming Chekov's gun that never goes off. There's a rather anti-climatic confrontation with the head bad guy. There's a minor character who literally gets forgotten and has to be gone back for, I think basically because the author herself forget, since the "going-back" part is so perfunctory. There's the second book in a row where the big tough operative literally passes out when he thinks something has happened to his romantic interest.
But most importantly, most of the romantic tension depends on people misreading each other in really implausible ways. I've now had a couple books in a row that I've read in which we hear characters' thought processes and it seems to me the only reason someone would interpret a situation the way each does is because the author needed them to. They repeatedly assume the worst when there's no good reason to do so. And it got old, fast. Especially when these misunderstandings were mostly cleared up in anticlimactic ways. Really, for a book with so much tension, the climax was surprisingly flat.
