Book Review – Where Danger Hides by Terry Odell

 Since I didn’t post my usual book review yesterday, here is another one from Carl Brookins. Keep ’em coming Carl. And here’s a link to Daily Cheap Reads where a number of authors have books mentioned that are on sale for only 99cents. One Small Victory is one of the books on sale until the end of May.
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Where Danger Hides
By Terry Odell
ISBN 978-1-43282-512-6
Five Star Mystery from Gale
May, 2011

The novel is a suspenseful thriller with a healthy dose of romance.  Or maybe it’s a romantic thriller with a good deal of suspense that keeps this moving at a sometimes alarming pace.  “Where Danger Hides” is both, and it’s also a fantasy in particular in the way and the speed with which the two principal characters are drawn together.

Miri Chambers is the caretaker and overseerer of a San Francisco shelter primarily for abused women.  Galoway House also manages to shelter and care for a number of children and men, as well. There’s a lot more to Miri Chambers. She is adept at disguise, light-fingered and as prickly as one can get. Two wrong words and she is liable to go off like a rocket. That propensity for shoot-from-the-hip judgments and attitude may also be the reason for her nearly unbelieveable hormonal response to the hunk she meets on a clandestine foray into the home office of a wealthy art patron.

Her reaction to “just” Dalton isn’t much different from his.  He works for a private security firm that has a large well-funded and mostly covert group of operatives working well outside the usual legal limits. Dalton, one of Blackthorn’s elite black ops operatives has an appreciated eye for female anatomy, wherever he finds it, including hiding under the desk of the aforementioned wealthy San Francisco Art patron.

Dalton and Miri Chambers are all fire and sparks and hot sex throughout this rollicking novel.  The author has created a pair of characters who could each carry the novel solo, but when you pair them, look out.

The action carries Dalton and Chambers from posh and elegant settings to gritty exceedingly dangerous operations.  Readers are not likely to predict each succeeding move.  One is required to suspend disbelief and recognize from the outset that explicit play, both sexual and firearms, is integral to the story.

Nevertheless, the plot is carefully and fully laid out, the dialogue is mostly logical and the tension carries well through the entire book. Gritty, tender, frustrating by turns I did feel that there were times when both characters exhibited too obtuse attitudes and were slower on the uptake than they should have been, given their life experiences.

Nevertheless, this is a fun read that makes several important points along the way.

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Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com Case of the Greedy Lawyer, Devils Island,
Bloody Halls, more at Kindle & Smashwords!