THE DEFIANT HERO (Troubleshooters #2; three stars)
Description from Goodreads: "The United States refuses to negotiate with terrorists." Meg Moore remembered the warning from her job as a translator in a European embassy. Those same words will spell out a death sentence for her daughter and grandmother who have been kidnapped by a lethal group called the Extremists. Meg will do anything to meet their unspeakable demands; anything--even kill--to save her child.
When Navy SEAL Lieutenant, junior grade, John Nilsson is summoned to Washington, D.C., by the FBI to help negotiate a hostage situation, the last person he expects to see holding a foreign ambassador at gunpoint is Meg. He hasn't seen her in years, but he's never forgotten how it feels to hold her in his arms. John could lose his career if he helps her escape. She will lose her life if he doesn't. . . .
Soooo this is the second Troubleshooters book. Discussion points:
Here's the thing: there is so little actual plot in this book that it didn’t even get one of those numbered points. The setup is that terrorists who know Meg has access to the Kazbekistan embassy in DC have kidnapped her grandmother and her daughter, and will kill them unless she either kills or kidnaps one of their political rivals. Meg is willing to do it, but in way over her head, so she calls a friend she made back in Kazbekistan a few years ago -- John Nilsson, this book's SEAL hero.
Meg and Nils are ... fine. They're basically okay. I like them! But mostly their relationship is kind of dull, which is a shame, because their backstory together is quite good. Meg and her husband both worked in the foreign service and were assigned to K-stan several years ago. A group of SEALs came in, ushering someone who was maybe a terrorist, maybe a spy, definitely wanted by partisans on all sides, with orders to somehow get him out of the country alive. Meg helped them hole up in the embassy, and caught on to their scheme pretty quickly -- they'd dressed their target up as one of them, and one of them as the target. They all evacuated, leaving him behind, only for the reveal to come later -- much to the embarrassment of Meg's diplomat husband. But Meg and Nils, the SEAL in question, became friends who maybe wanted to make out with each other a lot, but didn't, because of how she was married and all. Even though her husband was having multiple affairs.
Fast forward a few months, and they're all back in DC. Nils is the subject of an inquiry, headed up by Meg's husband, who's still pissed at having been fooled. Nils initially sets out to seduce Meg to get back at him, only to realize that he really loves her and doesn’t want to mess up her life; meanwhile, the husband finds out, encourages her to sleep with Nils so they'll be even, but Meg can't go through with it either. She breaks off all contact with Nils and they haven't seen each other since -- she didn't even tell him when her husband died in a car crash.
Then fast forward AGAIN to where the book's present day plot kicks off. Meg calls Nils for help; Nils brings in some of Team Sixteen as well as the FBI; Meg tricks everyone and takes off with her hostage in tow, planning to do whatever it takes to save her daughter. Nils goes after her. And then they spend the next 150 pages in a car. Literally. 150 pages of just Meg driving, while Nils tries to talk her out of this, and then she throws him out of the car, he cons his way back into the car, tries to talk her out of it, she throws him out again, repeat until the book's climax.
It doesn't help that neither one is all that memorable of a character. They're both good at languages. Meg is a bad liar, Nils is a good liar. Meg will stop at nothing to save her daughter, and Nils will stop at nothing to save Meg. And ... that's literally that. Nils, in particular, is fairly forgettable. There are a handful of SEALs in the series who are all pretty much interchangeable: large, honorable men who protect people and do the right thing and have no other discernable character traits -- and Nils is one of them. Sorry, Nils.
To be fair, there is one bit of his backstory that was really interesting to me. Nils is a skilled liar, who's spent years presenting himself as a (grown up) spoiled rich kid -- he went to private schools, a good college, and everyone sees him climbing the ranks to become an admiral someday. Except, it turns out, while all that is true-ish, Nils was at the private schools because his dad was the janitor, got through college purely on scholarships, and has been faking his way through everything since and is deeply ashamed of his actual upbringing. I wish that aspect had been drawn out more, but while there was some dialogue about Meg never knowing when he was telling the truth, it wasn't really vital to their relationship. Brockmann novels touch on class a lot, and it's obviously something that interests her in relationship dynamics (me too!) so I wish this had actually done anything at all.
I'll also add, to be fair, that I liked them fine, and I liked that it was clear Nils could easily have overpowered Meg at any point but was waiting for her to actually ask for help, so he'd be able to honestly say she'd turned herself in. But overall, yeah, Meg and Nils are dull. As was the primary plot of the book. Sorry, book.
#2: Eve. So Eve is Meg's grandmother, who happens to be with Amy (Meg's daughter) when she's kidnapped. This leads to the book's WWII flashbacks. To keep Amy calm (and maybe slightly charm one of their captors), Eve narrates the story of how she met and fell in love with her first husband, leading to her dressing as a boy and assisting with the evacuation at Dunkirk.
All of which is, again ... fine.
The thing is, while it's kind of a WWII story, it's actually not really. It's the lead-up to the war -- the war is really only incidental, and Dunkirk is barely mentioned at all. Eve's upbringing (orphaned daughter of a movie star, trying to protect and raise her little brother) was fascinating, and the romance was sweet enough (she was only 15 when she fell in love with her brother's tutor, who thought she was 20; what actually separated them was him finding out how young she really was). But other than proving that Eve has always had pluck, it didn't add anything to the narrative at all. Unlike in THE UNSUNG HERO, it didn't tie back into or echo the present-day storyline. So once again, I found myself skimming flashbacks -- but this time I wasn't even looking to get back to the primary couple, because they were still literally just driving down the interstate not doing anything. Instead, I was looking for ...
#3: Sam and Alyssa!
Sam and Alyssa are so much more engaging than Meg and Nils. Who are, again, perfectly lovely -- but all of their conflict is external based on the whole driving-down-the-interstate plot thing. (Which is also why their backstory is so much better than their present day story.) Sam and Alyssa, on the other hand, are steeped in conflict stemming from their core characters. Sam is a swaggering cowboy who is kinda sexist and kinda homophobic; he has a squishy inner core (and it's pretty clear from the get-go will get over those problematic personality traits) but it hasn't come out yet. Alyssa is uptight and wants to be taken seriously. She's already had career issues stemming from that -- she left the navy for the FBI between books, because the navy wasn't taking her seriously (she's the #1 ranked sharpshooter in the country, but they kept trying to give her desk jobs) -- and she hates that men like Sam (men, period, in most cases) look at her and see a sex object rather than a highly skilled agent.
He can't stop himself from pissing her off, because it's easy and entertaining; she can't stop herself from taking his bait because she hates him so much. They are absolutely terrible for each other, but their chemistry is off the charts.
AND THEN THEY BANG :D :D :D
I do have some quibbles with their hookup, but their back and forths taunting each other had me totally reeled in. I was way more captivated by them than by any of the other couples in play in the story, and I really wanted them to get over their issues and get together. (I mean, I've read later books in the series, I know how this turns out, but even so.) And their sex scenes, while a bit ridiculous, were also super hot; and their storyline was way more memorable than Meg and Nils's. So basically, they stole the whole book.
My quibbles actually tie into each other a bit. First: in their confrontations, Sam pretty much always wins. With the exception of her sniper skills, he's generally presented as the better operator (she's clearly still learning, but him schooling her made me a bit uncomfortable), and he usually gets the last word. The only time he doesn't is when he actually does anything to reveal his squishy inner core and she stomps on it. And hey, I don't blame her; he's been a total jackass to her throughout, so why should she suddenly respond well to his attempts to be friendly? (Or what he considers friendly, which is to say, still being a jackass, but the same kind of jackass he is to his friends. She responds badly, but she has no way to tell the difference.)
And then there's this irritating piece in the background. Alyssa is very skilled, and determined to be taken seriously. She's been facing down sexism since she first enlisted, so she goes out of her way to be as ice cold and professional as possible. ...and then that all goes out the window as soon as Sam is involved. It would be one thing if the text recognized that, and she struggled with it, but it's literally just forgotten (and this continues into the next book, too). It makes sense that Alyssa's character should be ultra-professional, but she often just isn't and the text never interrogates that. She makes unprofessional decisions with basically no justification, and then the text continues to present her as if she were solely focused on her career.
Some of that is mitigated in the end. During the eventual action climax (it's, like, four pages long, after all that freaking driving) the target Alyssa takes down sees her as a weak link, and she swiftly proves him wrong. Lovely! But it comes after her getting drunk, handcuffing herself to Sam, having sex with him repeatedly, realizing she hates him, and then having sex with him some more. It would be one thing if her character was presented as seeing her sex life and her professional life as completely separate, but it says throughout that she doesn't want to get entangled with him because it'll reflect badly on her career, and then she completely does it anyway.
AND YET, I still love them and want them to get married and have awesome sex with chocolate syrup all the time. As a couple, they are much better than those quibbles, and I genuinely do look forward to seeing their relationship play out in the next few books.
BROCKMANN-ISM TALLY
When Navy SEAL Lieutenant, junior grade, John Nilsson is summoned to Washington, D.C., by the FBI to help negotiate a hostage situation, the last person he expects to see holding a foreign ambassador at gunpoint is Meg. He hasn't seen her in years, but he's never forgotten how it feels to hold her in his arms. John could lose his career if he helps her escape. She will lose her life if he doesn't. . . .
Soooo this is the second Troubleshooters book. Discussion points:
- Meg and Nils;
- Eve;
- SAM AND ALYSSA THO.
Here's the thing: there is so little actual plot in this book that it didn’t even get one of those numbered points. The setup is that terrorists who know Meg has access to the Kazbekistan embassy in DC have kidnapped her grandmother and her daughter, and will kill them unless she either kills or kidnaps one of their political rivals. Meg is willing to do it, but in way over her head, so she calls a friend she made back in Kazbekistan a few years ago -- John Nilsson, this book's SEAL hero.
Meg and Nils are ... fine. They're basically okay. I like them! But mostly their relationship is kind of dull, which is a shame, because their backstory together is quite good. Meg and her husband both worked in the foreign service and were assigned to K-stan several years ago. A group of SEALs came in, ushering someone who was maybe a terrorist, maybe a spy, definitely wanted by partisans on all sides, with orders to somehow get him out of the country alive. Meg helped them hole up in the embassy, and caught on to their scheme pretty quickly -- they'd dressed their target up as one of them, and one of them as the target. They all evacuated, leaving him behind, only for the reveal to come later -- much to the embarrassment of Meg's diplomat husband. But Meg and Nils, the SEAL in question, became friends who maybe wanted to make out with each other a lot, but didn't, because of how she was married and all. Even though her husband was having multiple affairs.
Fast forward a few months, and they're all back in DC. Nils is the subject of an inquiry, headed up by Meg's husband, who's still pissed at having been fooled. Nils initially sets out to seduce Meg to get back at him, only to realize that he really loves her and doesn’t want to mess up her life; meanwhile, the husband finds out, encourages her to sleep with Nils so they'll be even, but Meg can't go through with it either. She breaks off all contact with Nils and they haven't seen each other since -- she didn't even tell him when her husband died in a car crash.
Then fast forward AGAIN to where the book's present day plot kicks off. Meg calls Nils for help; Nils brings in some of Team Sixteen as well as the FBI; Meg tricks everyone and takes off with her hostage in tow, planning to do whatever it takes to save her daughter. Nils goes after her. And then they spend the next 150 pages in a car. Literally. 150 pages of just Meg driving, while Nils tries to talk her out of this, and then she throws him out of the car, he cons his way back into the car, tries to talk her out of it, she throws him out again, repeat until the book's climax.
It doesn't help that neither one is all that memorable of a character. They're both good at languages. Meg is a bad liar, Nils is a good liar. Meg will stop at nothing to save her daughter, and Nils will stop at nothing to save Meg. And ... that's literally that. Nils, in particular, is fairly forgettable. There are a handful of SEALs in the series who are all pretty much interchangeable: large, honorable men who protect people and do the right thing and have no other discernable character traits -- and Nils is one of them. Sorry, Nils.
To be fair, there is one bit of his backstory that was really interesting to me. Nils is a skilled liar, who's spent years presenting himself as a (grown up) spoiled rich kid -- he went to private schools, a good college, and everyone sees him climbing the ranks to become an admiral someday. Except, it turns out, while all that is true-ish, Nils was at the private schools because his dad was the janitor, got through college purely on scholarships, and has been faking his way through everything since and is deeply ashamed of his actual upbringing. I wish that aspect had been drawn out more, but while there was some dialogue about Meg never knowing when he was telling the truth, it wasn't really vital to their relationship. Brockmann novels touch on class a lot, and it's obviously something that interests her in relationship dynamics (me too!) so I wish this had actually done anything at all.
I'll also add, to be fair, that I liked them fine, and I liked that it was clear Nils could easily have overpowered Meg at any point but was waiting for her to actually ask for help, so he'd be able to honestly say she'd turned herself in. But overall, yeah, Meg and Nils are dull. As was the primary plot of the book. Sorry, book.
#2: Eve. So Eve is Meg's grandmother, who happens to be with Amy (Meg's daughter) when she's kidnapped. This leads to the book's WWII flashbacks. To keep Amy calm (and maybe slightly charm one of their captors), Eve narrates the story of how she met and fell in love with her first husband, leading to her dressing as a boy and assisting with the evacuation at Dunkirk.
All of which is, again ... fine.
The thing is, while it's kind of a WWII story, it's actually not really. It's the lead-up to the war -- the war is really only incidental, and Dunkirk is barely mentioned at all. Eve's upbringing (orphaned daughter of a movie star, trying to protect and raise her little brother) was fascinating, and the romance was sweet enough (she was only 15 when she fell in love with her brother's tutor, who thought she was 20; what actually separated them was him finding out how young she really was). But other than proving that Eve has always had pluck, it didn't add anything to the narrative at all. Unlike in THE UNSUNG HERO, it didn't tie back into or echo the present-day storyline. So once again, I found myself skimming flashbacks -- but this time I wasn't even looking to get back to the primary couple, because they were still literally just driving down the interstate not doing anything. Instead, I was looking for ...
#3: Sam and Alyssa!
Sam and Alyssa are so much more engaging than Meg and Nils. Who are, again, perfectly lovely -- but all of their conflict is external based on the whole driving-down-the-interstate plot thing. (Which is also why their backstory is so much better than their present day story.) Sam and Alyssa, on the other hand, are steeped in conflict stemming from their core characters. Sam is a swaggering cowboy who is kinda sexist and kinda homophobic; he has a squishy inner core (and it's pretty clear from the get-go will get over those problematic personality traits) but it hasn't come out yet. Alyssa is uptight and wants to be taken seriously. She's already had career issues stemming from that -- she left the navy for the FBI between books, because the navy wasn't taking her seriously (she's the #1 ranked sharpshooter in the country, but they kept trying to give her desk jobs) -- and she hates that men like Sam (men, period, in most cases) look at her and see a sex object rather than a highly skilled agent.
He can't stop himself from pissing her off, because it's easy and entertaining; she can't stop herself from taking his bait because she hates him so much. They are absolutely terrible for each other, but their chemistry is off the charts.
AND THEN THEY BANG :D :D :D
I do have some quibbles with their hookup, but their back and forths taunting each other had me totally reeled in. I was way more captivated by them than by any of the other couples in play in the story, and I really wanted them to get over their issues and get together. (I mean, I've read later books in the series, I know how this turns out, but even so.) And their sex scenes, while a bit ridiculous, were also super hot; and their storyline was way more memorable than Meg and Nils's. So basically, they stole the whole book.
My quibbles actually tie into each other a bit. First: in their confrontations, Sam pretty much always wins. With the exception of her sniper skills, he's generally presented as the better operator (she's clearly still learning, but him schooling her made me a bit uncomfortable), and he usually gets the last word. The only time he doesn't is when he actually does anything to reveal his squishy inner core and she stomps on it. And hey, I don't blame her; he's been a total jackass to her throughout, so why should she suddenly respond well to his attempts to be friendly? (Or what he considers friendly, which is to say, still being a jackass, but the same kind of jackass he is to his friends. She responds badly, but she has no way to tell the difference.)
And then there's this irritating piece in the background. Alyssa is very skilled, and determined to be taken seriously. She's been facing down sexism since she first enlisted, so she goes out of her way to be as ice cold and professional as possible. ...and then that all goes out the window as soon as Sam is involved. It would be one thing if the text recognized that, and she struggled with it, but it's literally just forgotten (and this continues into the next book, too). It makes sense that Alyssa's character should be ultra-professional, but she often just isn't and the text never interrogates that. She makes unprofessional decisions with basically no justification, and then the text continues to present her as if she were solely focused on her career.
Some of that is mitigated in the end. During the eventual action climax (it's, like, four pages long, after all that freaking driving) the target Alyssa takes down sees her as a weak link, and she swiftly proves him wrong. Lovely! But it comes after her getting drunk, handcuffing herself to Sam, having sex with him repeatedly, realizing she hates him, and then having sex with him some more. It would be one thing if her character was presented as seeing her sex life and her professional life as completely separate, but it says throughout that she doesn't want to get entangled with him because it'll reflect badly on her career, and then she completely does it anyway.
AND YET, I still love them and want them to get married and have awesome sex with chocolate syrup all the time. As a couple, they are much better than those quibbles, and I genuinely do look forward to seeing their relationship play out in the next few books.
BROCKMANN-ISM TALLY
- USES OF THE PHRASE "SOUL-KISS": one
- COUPLE WHO KNEW EACH OTHER IN HIGH SCHOOL AND/OR SHE'S HIS FRIEND'S SISTER: absent (unless you count Eve and her beau -- he's her brother's tutor, so that's similar, sort of)
- PREGNANCY SCARE HE SECRETLY THINKS IS HOT: There are two. Nils and Meg have unprotected sex because she thinks she's going to die and they figure getting knocked up will give her a reason to live and he's sooooo excited; Sam and Alyssa have unprotected sex in the shower and then they both panic about it, but he also thinks it's hot that she might be preggers.
- SEX AT AN INOPPORTUNE TIME AND HE CAN'T PULL OUT BECAUSE REASONS: I think the shower sex counts here too, when he abruptly realizes he’s not wearing a condom and is totally about to come.
- SOMEONE HAS THE FLU/FOOD POISONING/OTHERWISE VOMITS FOR NO REASON: Not flu or food poisoning, but Alyssa pukes while hungover. This must be before Sam got assigned the fun recurring trait of being a sympathy vomiter, because she's handcuffed to him and he doesn't get at all sick himself, where in later books he would end up puking too.
- JAY LOPEZ SHOWS UP, EXPLAINS THAT HE'S A MEDIC, AND VANISHES AGAIN: Lopez is in a few scenes, bro-ing around with Sam and being friendly. He doesn't say he's a medic, but the narrative does.
- JULES: HI BABY, HIIIII. In Jules's first appearance, he is wearing leather pants and a fake nose ring, and uses Sam's homophobia to get him to stop harassing Alyssa.
- SAM AND ALYSSA: Spend the night handcuffed together and bang like three times. Huzzah.