FLASHPOINT (Troubleshooters #7; three and a half stars)
And I’m back!
From Goodreads: Jimmy Nash has already lived two lives--and he can't talk about either of them. Formerly an operative of a top secret government agency, he has found a new job with a shadowy company called Troubleshooters Inc. Created by a former Navy SEAL, Troubleshooters Inc. helps anyone in desperate need--which provides a perfect cover for its other, more perilous objective: covert special operations.
Now Nash and a quickly assembled team of expert operators have come to the earthquake-ravaged country of Kazbekistan in the guise of relief workers. There, amid the dust and death, in a land of blood red sunsets and ancient blood feuds, they must track down a missing laptop computer that may hold secrets vital to national security.
To get it done, Nash does what he does best: break every rule in the book and manipulate those who can help him get what he needs. But this time, Nash may have met his match in Tess Bailey, an Troubleshooters operative with all the right instincts--and zero field experience. The deep attraction between them is immediate . . . and potentially explosive, with risk at every turn. Now these two professionals must play out their dangerous games in the world's most dangerous place--cut off from their own government, cutting deals with people they can't trust, and guarding forbidden passions that threaten to compromise their crucial mission.
Really, Troubleshooters is “shadowy”? Okay, then. Anyway, this book marks a total recalibration of the series. How well did it work? Well…
I: Welcome to TS Inc
II: Nash and Decker, Who Are You, and Why Won’t You Just Make Out?
III: Oh Right, The Plot
I: The previous book was a pretty clear ending of the first part of the series. It wrapped up a number of ongoing threads: Sam and Alyssa were finally together, Tom and Kelly were finally married, and Tom left the navy to start Troubleshooters, taking Sam and Alyssa with him. This doesn’t wrap up every storyline that had been introduced -- Max and Gina are still up in the air -- but it felt very much like a season finale. And thus FLASHPOINT is the equivalent of a season premier, one where the show was retooled during the hiatus.
The easiest change is that the WWII subplots are gone. I was two-thirds of the way through the book before I realized that, which I think goes to show how little I missed them. They were pretty hit-or-miss, more often misses than hits, and even the more enjoyable ones tended to slow down the books. Letting them fall by the wayside was probably a good choice.
But the bigger change was the change of focus. FLASHPOINT is the first book that doesn’t center around a SEAL, and Team Sixteen has only the briefest of cameos. It also doesn’t center around any of the characters we’ve met previously. The first book introduced Tom and his crew; books two through six each fleshed out one of those characters -- while other folks, like Max and Jones, were floating around, there was no question that the series about about a SEAL team. But now it’s about TS Inc, and the people working there. In FLASHPOINT, those folks are Nash, Decker, Dave, Murphy, and Tess … and you may have noticed, we’ve never met any of them before.
The thing about having read bits and pieces of the series before in a completely random order is that I just sort of went along with all of this. I’ve read Decker’s book from way, way later in the series, so for me this was just a look back at how he, Nash, and Dave had been introduced. But my BFF who did actually read in order says she found it very disconcerting to be thrown into a book of entirely new characters, and wondered if she’d missed a book somewhere, and a quick glance at Goodreads shows a lot of people feel the same.
It really doesn’t help that the book treats Nash and Decker as if they are already well established characters where we’ve already got emotional buy-in. Which leads me to…
II: Nash and Decker are fine, perfectly serviceable characters. I’ll start with Decker, though it’s really Nash’s book, because Decker is a lot easier to sum up. He’s a former SEAL, and, well… having read the first six books, that’s pretty much all you need to know. He is upstanding and brave and true (aside from that whole Sophia thing, ick). And, like your Nils/Stan/Mike SEAL types, he’s also pretty dull, and until I had Nash as a POV character here, I couldn’t tell him and Nash apart -- as far as I was concerned, they were just Those Two Guys. Even after reading Decker’s book. Now, having read this… well, they’re still Those Two Guys, but as dull as Decker is, I more or less like Nash.
Nash is the first primary protagonist we’ve had in the series who is not a SEAL. The closest thing we’ve seen to his character type before is Jones, because the book tells us over and over again that Nash has done ~bad things~ and is ~unsaveable~. But, um. The book never tells us what those bad things are. And actually… wait, lemme back up. The book opens with Nash, Decker, and Tess all working for the Agency. What is the Agency? It’s never explained. It’s some kind of shadowy government organization, sort of an ersatz CIA (but definitely not actually the CIA). They seem to be a mostly above-board organization (it’s not a secret where these people used to work), but they also carry out black ops and “deletions.” And it’s very weird, because all of the other characters belong to real-life groups, be it the navy, FBI, or, yeah, Dave from the CIA. The Agency seems to be Brockmann’s way of avoiding implying that any of those orgs would do anything dishonest or illegal, and thus keep real world politics of any sort out of the series, which make sense. But unfortunately, when you contrast a spooky shadow Agency with real, familiar government organizations, it seems, well… very silly.
Anyway. So. Nash and Decker had been working together at the Agency for years, and Nash in particularly seems to have been an assassin. And this is after some other mysterious bad things in his past. It’s implied that he was in the mob, but nothing ever happens with that. He’s been in jail, for … some reason? Possibly he got out specifically because he was recruited for the Agency, but it’s never made clear. Anyway, we’re told by the book 1) that Nash has darkness in his soul and is bad news all around and no one really trusts him but Decker; and 2) that Nash and Decker are legendary.
Here’s the problem with all of that: it is all told, not shown, and thus falls completely flat. Nash’s romance with Tess is a redemption story -- he spends the whole thing knowing he’s too bad to ever be with her, only to find out at the end that she knew about his dark past all along and loves him anyway. Which is all well and good, except we never see him being bad. In fact, we see the opposite. Any time he and Decker have to take on and kill baddies, Nash gets shaky hands and sick to his stomach over the guilt. He intentionally lets people beat himself up as a form of self-flagellation for all the horrible stuff he’s done. (Decker, by contrast, is completely unaffected.) Nash also shows incredible kindness to locals during their mission, finding any excuse to slip people in need extra money or medical supplies, and evidently he does this on every mission.
So Nash is supposed to be the dark and sinister one, but he never does anything that literally any other character wouldn’t, including Decker, who he holds up as his gold standard of everything pure and good in the universe. It would be effective if he’d been a character through the series who had done bad things and now we see him grappling with them; but all we get is this one book, in which he doesn’t do anything particularly bad, so it’s robbed of all its teeth. And that’s a shame. I really like the idea of having a morally ambiguous hero in the series to contrast all of the good and pure SEALs, and that’s clearly what Nash is supposed to be. Instead he and Tess just read like a lesser Jones and Molly. Given that Jones and Molly were only a B-plot, that’s not great.
As for the part about him and Decker being legendary, that’s similar. It’s completely ineffective because we’ve never seen them or heard of them before, and they certainly don’t do anything more impressive or exciting than any of our other heroes have. It comes across like an attempt to get buy-in from readers, but that’s just not how emotional investment works. I don’t care if you tell me these guys are amazing, if I’ve never seen them be amazing. Alas.
Anyway, so, Nash and Decker don’t really work the way they’re supposed to. And yet I still really enjoyed them because HOLY CRAP THAT WAS A LOT OF HO-YAY. It hit me somewhat unexpectedly, since the later stuff I’ve read doesn’t focus on them as a couple their friendship so heavily; and because the series includes actual gay romances, so I didn’t expect quite so much homoeroticism elsewhere. But wow. Just. Wow.
Among other things, we have the fact that they are both into the same woman, but each spend a lot of time thinking about how she should be with the other one because he’s so wonderful; they go to bat for each other, each refusing to leave a bad situation/take a new job/etc unless the other comes, too; they share literally everything with each other, to the point where Decker tells Tom he refuses to keep any aspects of the mission secret from Nash, and Nash tells Dave that talking to him is effectively talking to Decker; they notice each other’s beautiful eyelashes; and holy crap wow, whenever one of them is about to have sex, they spend a lot of time thinking about the other.
Also oh yeah, at one point Nash kisses another dude on the mouth. As a joke. Just for funsies. Like you do. Sadly it’s not Decker he kisses, but Nash never thinks about it again and Decker doesn’t even blink so … well, I don’t know what Brockmann intended, but in my head, Nash is definitely someone who kisses dudes regularly. Including Decker, yeah I ship it.
III: Oh yeah, this book has a plot, I guess. There’s been an earthquake in the troubled country of Kazbekistan, and so the country allows in relief workers, the first time its borders have been open in several years. It’s confirmed that a terrorist died during the quake, and Troubleshooters has been hired to find his laptop, which contains all kinds of information. Decker and Nash have just quit the Agency after a mission gone bad, and have been hired by Tom. Tess, meanwhile, had worked in “support” for them at the Agency, where she was trying to get moved into being a field agent, and after years of flirting she and Nash had a one night stand right before he quit. By coincidence, she finally got fed up with her transfer being denied, also quit, and is hired by Tom. She’s brand new to field work, but is the only communications specialist Troubleshooters has, so she gets placed on the team, much to Nash’s dismay.
They, along with fellow newcomers Dave (former CIA) and Murphy (former marine), all head to Kazbekistan, disguised as relief workers, and run into evil reporter Will. Will is another character who doesn’t really work -- he’s got a whole lot of backstory about his photographer wife and their divorce (and apparently she and Nash slept together, and so Will and Nash hate each other). Whatevs. Anyway, the whole thing with the laptop is a clear MacGuffin. They spend almost no page time actually looking for it -- well, Murphy and Dave do, but they aren’t POV characters so it’s just them reporting back -- while Tess and Nash work through their issues and fall for each other. (I do enjoy them as a couple, and I love that Nash is braced for Tess to be heartbroken and angry at him over the one-nighter -- but actually she’s angry that he quit the Agency and didn’t tell her. She knew it was a one night stand, but she thought they were friends. Friends do not quit after years without alerting their other friends!)
Meanwhile, a woman named Sophia has been held prisoner by a Kazbekastani warlord for months, after he killed her husband. The quake gave her a shot at escape, but now there’s a price on her head. Decker has been asked by Tom to try to track down her husband, who he may want to recruit, and instead finds her. In the worst way possible. Decker doesn’t exactly know who she is, but knows she’s not telling the full truth. She also has no idea who he is, and thinks he might be working for the warlord. She can’t shake him, so she decides her only option is to kill him, and the only way she can manage it is by distracting him with sex. So: she goes down on him, and tries to shoot him when he comes.
Basically, my feeling is D: . It sets them up for an ongoing story arch -- I have actually read how that plays out and won’t spoil it -- but it super doesn’t work for me. Especially not because everyone instantly tells Decker it’s not his fault, it’s fine, she seduced him so he’s not guilty of anything, etc etc. But like… no. Even though she’s the one who offers sex, he’s fully aware that there’s something more going on. He doesn’t trust her but knows she’s trapped, and that he very much has the upper hand. They both know she’s desperate (Decker had set up a test to see just how scared she was of him, and the result was really scared), and they both know he can physically overpower her very easily.
I don’t care if she offered to go down on him. The power dynamics there are totally fucked up. Decker “giving in” and having sex with her wasn’t okay, and other characters letting him off the hook -- blaming Sophia, in fact -- is also not okay. The one saving grace is that while everyone else, even Sophia, says it was fine, Decker continues to blame himself for books to come. Otherwise, I would really have to hate him.
(There’s also a gratuitous, gross moment when Tess sees a photo of Sophia, who is a petite, “perfect” blond, and instantly starts mentally referring to her as a bitch. Because … women hate other women, I guess? What is that even doing there, ugh.)
Other than that… hm. The book is well paced; it’s on the shorter side for the series, and juggling fewer plots than most of the series. Though, like the fifth book, there’s an odd amount of off-page action. The most gratuitous example is when Nash comes back after going out to meet a contact one night -- the contact sold him out and tried to kill him, and Decker unexpectedly shows up to save his life. And this is all described to Tess after the fact. Ummm, maybe when someone attempts to murder the main character, that warrants a real scene? Also, at the climax, Will is literally forgotten about. They have to go back and get him as they’re on the brink of being rescued, but rather than adding to the rescue, it just feels like maybe Brockmann forgot he’d been brought in to the story and didn’t feel like going back to rewrite.
On the plus side, that one moment of random girlhate aside, I did really like Tess. She got me from the beginning, when she realized her boss was never going to let her switch to field work and they were just trying to keep her on where she was by encouraging her to reapply every year. So she called their bluff and quit. There was also the previously-mentioned moment where she calls out Nash for not really being her friend after all. And while she does make a few rookie mistakes in the field, she is ultra-competent throughout. She’s a great with their communications set up, and she’s a great hacker. (She was able to find not just Nash’s official Agency file, but the super secret secure hidden ultra file, or whatever.) And MY FAVE, at the climax, when Nash is busy freaking out that he has to go rescue her, she has already rescued herself, thanks so much. Her determination to use her skills in the field instead of on the sidelines, and her bravery and determination throughout, are all great.
So that’s kind of that. It is definitely not the strongest book in the series. It’s really just a three star affair, that I gave an extra half-star because man, Nash/Decker 5eva.
BROCKMANNISM TALLY
From Goodreads: Jimmy Nash has already lived two lives--and he can't talk about either of them. Formerly an operative of a top secret government agency, he has found a new job with a shadowy company called Troubleshooters Inc. Created by a former Navy SEAL, Troubleshooters Inc. helps anyone in desperate need--which provides a perfect cover for its other, more perilous objective: covert special operations.
Now Nash and a quickly assembled team of expert operators have come to the earthquake-ravaged country of Kazbekistan in the guise of relief workers. There, amid the dust and death, in a land of blood red sunsets and ancient blood feuds, they must track down a missing laptop computer that may hold secrets vital to national security.
To get it done, Nash does what he does best: break every rule in the book and manipulate those who can help him get what he needs. But this time, Nash may have met his match in Tess Bailey, an Troubleshooters operative with all the right instincts--and zero field experience. The deep attraction between them is immediate . . . and potentially explosive, with risk at every turn. Now these two professionals must play out their dangerous games in the world's most dangerous place--cut off from their own government, cutting deals with people they can't trust, and guarding forbidden passions that threaten to compromise their crucial mission.
Really, Troubleshooters is “shadowy”? Okay, then. Anyway, this book marks a total recalibration of the series. How well did it work? Well…
I: Welcome to TS Inc
II: Nash and Decker, Who Are You, and Why Won’t You Just Make Out?
III: Oh Right, The Plot
I: The previous book was a pretty clear ending of the first part of the series. It wrapped up a number of ongoing threads: Sam and Alyssa were finally together, Tom and Kelly were finally married, and Tom left the navy to start Troubleshooters, taking Sam and Alyssa with him. This doesn’t wrap up every storyline that had been introduced -- Max and Gina are still up in the air -- but it felt very much like a season finale. And thus FLASHPOINT is the equivalent of a season premier, one where the show was retooled during the hiatus.
The easiest change is that the WWII subplots are gone. I was two-thirds of the way through the book before I realized that, which I think goes to show how little I missed them. They were pretty hit-or-miss, more often misses than hits, and even the more enjoyable ones tended to slow down the books. Letting them fall by the wayside was probably a good choice.
But the bigger change was the change of focus. FLASHPOINT is the first book that doesn’t center around a SEAL, and Team Sixteen has only the briefest of cameos. It also doesn’t center around any of the characters we’ve met previously. The first book introduced Tom and his crew; books two through six each fleshed out one of those characters -- while other folks, like Max and Jones, were floating around, there was no question that the series about about a SEAL team. But now it’s about TS Inc, and the people working there. In FLASHPOINT, those folks are Nash, Decker, Dave, Murphy, and Tess … and you may have noticed, we’ve never met any of them before.
The thing about having read bits and pieces of the series before in a completely random order is that I just sort of went along with all of this. I’ve read Decker’s book from way, way later in the series, so for me this was just a look back at how he, Nash, and Dave had been introduced. But my BFF who did actually read in order says she found it very disconcerting to be thrown into a book of entirely new characters, and wondered if she’d missed a book somewhere, and a quick glance at Goodreads shows a lot of people feel the same.
It really doesn’t help that the book treats Nash and Decker as if they are already well established characters where we’ve already got emotional buy-in. Which leads me to…
II: Nash and Decker are fine, perfectly serviceable characters. I’ll start with Decker, though it’s really Nash’s book, because Decker is a lot easier to sum up. He’s a former SEAL, and, well… having read the first six books, that’s pretty much all you need to know. He is upstanding and brave and true (aside from that whole Sophia thing, ick). And, like your Nils/Stan/Mike SEAL types, he’s also pretty dull, and until I had Nash as a POV character here, I couldn’t tell him and Nash apart -- as far as I was concerned, they were just Those Two Guys. Even after reading Decker’s book. Now, having read this… well, they’re still Those Two Guys, but as dull as Decker is, I more or less like Nash.
Nash is the first primary protagonist we’ve had in the series who is not a SEAL. The closest thing we’ve seen to his character type before is Jones, because the book tells us over and over again that Nash has done ~bad things~ and is ~unsaveable~. But, um. The book never tells us what those bad things are. And actually… wait, lemme back up. The book opens with Nash, Decker, and Tess all working for the Agency. What is the Agency? It’s never explained. It’s some kind of shadowy government organization, sort of an ersatz CIA (but definitely not actually the CIA). They seem to be a mostly above-board organization (it’s not a secret where these people used to work), but they also carry out black ops and “deletions.” And it’s very weird, because all of the other characters belong to real-life groups, be it the navy, FBI, or, yeah, Dave from the CIA. The Agency seems to be Brockmann’s way of avoiding implying that any of those orgs would do anything dishonest or illegal, and thus keep real world politics of any sort out of the series, which make sense. But unfortunately, when you contrast a spooky shadow Agency with real, familiar government organizations, it seems, well… very silly.
Anyway. So. Nash and Decker had been working together at the Agency for years, and Nash in particularly seems to have been an assassin. And this is after some other mysterious bad things in his past. It’s implied that he was in the mob, but nothing ever happens with that. He’s been in jail, for … some reason? Possibly he got out specifically because he was recruited for the Agency, but it’s never made clear. Anyway, we’re told by the book 1) that Nash has darkness in his soul and is bad news all around and no one really trusts him but Decker; and 2) that Nash and Decker are legendary.
Here’s the problem with all of that: it is all told, not shown, and thus falls completely flat. Nash’s romance with Tess is a redemption story -- he spends the whole thing knowing he’s too bad to ever be with her, only to find out at the end that she knew about his dark past all along and loves him anyway. Which is all well and good, except we never see him being bad. In fact, we see the opposite. Any time he and Decker have to take on and kill baddies, Nash gets shaky hands and sick to his stomach over the guilt. He intentionally lets people beat himself up as a form of self-flagellation for all the horrible stuff he’s done. (Decker, by contrast, is completely unaffected.) Nash also shows incredible kindness to locals during their mission, finding any excuse to slip people in need extra money or medical supplies, and evidently he does this on every mission.
So Nash is supposed to be the dark and sinister one, but he never does anything that literally any other character wouldn’t, including Decker, who he holds up as his gold standard of everything pure and good in the universe. It would be effective if he’d been a character through the series who had done bad things and now we see him grappling with them; but all we get is this one book, in which he doesn’t do anything particularly bad, so it’s robbed of all its teeth. And that’s a shame. I really like the idea of having a morally ambiguous hero in the series to contrast all of the good and pure SEALs, and that’s clearly what Nash is supposed to be. Instead he and Tess just read like a lesser Jones and Molly. Given that Jones and Molly were only a B-plot, that’s not great.
As for the part about him and Decker being legendary, that’s similar. It’s completely ineffective because we’ve never seen them or heard of them before, and they certainly don’t do anything more impressive or exciting than any of our other heroes have. It comes across like an attempt to get buy-in from readers, but that’s just not how emotional investment works. I don’t care if you tell me these guys are amazing, if I’ve never seen them be amazing. Alas.
Anyway, so, Nash and Decker don’t really work the way they’re supposed to. And yet I still really enjoyed them because HOLY CRAP THAT WAS A LOT OF HO-YAY. It hit me somewhat unexpectedly, since the later stuff I’ve read doesn’t focus on them as a couple their friendship so heavily; and because the series includes actual gay romances, so I didn’t expect quite so much homoeroticism elsewhere. But wow. Just. Wow.
Among other things, we have the fact that they are both into the same woman, but each spend a lot of time thinking about how she should be with the other one because he’s so wonderful; they go to bat for each other, each refusing to leave a bad situation/take a new job/etc unless the other comes, too; they share literally everything with each other, to the point where Decker tells Tom he refuses to keep any aspects of the mission secret from Nash, and Nash tells Dave that talking to him is effectively talking to Decker; they notice each other’s beautiful eyelashes; and holy crap wow, whenever one of them is about to have sex, they spend a lot of time thinking about the other.
Also oh yeah, at one point Nash kisses another dude on the mouth. As a joke. Just for funsies. Like you do. Sadly it’s not Decker he kisses, but Nash never thinks about it again and Decker doesn’t even blink so … well, I don’t know what Brockmann intended, but in my head, Nash is definitely someone who kisses dudes regularly. Including Decker, yeah I ship it.
III: Oh yeah, this book has a plot, I guess. There’s been an earthquake in the troubled country of Kazbekistan, and so the country allows in relief workers, the first time its borders have been open in several years. It’s confirmed that a terrorist died during the quake, and Troubleshooters has been hired to find his laptop, which contains all kinds of information. Decker and Nash have just quit the Agency after a mission gone bad, and have been hired by Tom. Tess, meanwhile, had worked in “support” for them at the Agency, where she was trying to get moved into being a field agent, and after years of flirting she and Nash had a one night stand right before he quit. By coincidence, she finally got fed up with her transfer being denied, also quit, and is hired by Tom. She’s brand new to field work, but is the only communications specialist Troubleshooters has, so she gets placed on the team, much to Nash’s dismay.
They, along with fellow newcomers Dave (former CIA) and Murphy (former marine), all head to Kazbekistan, disguised as relief workers, and run into evil reporter Will. Will is another character who doesn’t really work -- he’s got a whole lot of backstory about his photographer wife and their divorce (and apparently she and Nash slept together, and so Will and Nash hate each other). Whatevs. Anyway, the whole thing with the laptop is a clear MacGuffin. They spend almost no page time actually looking for it -- well, Murphy and Dave do, but they aren’t POV characters so it’s just them reporting back -- while Tess and Nash work through their issues and fall for each other. (I do enjoy them as a couple, and I love that Nash is braced for Tess to be heartbroken and angry at him over the one-nighter -- but actually she’s angry that he quit the Agency and didn’t tell her. She knew it was a one night stand, but she thought they were friends. Friends do not quit after years without alerting their other friends!)
Meanwhile, a woman named Sophia has been held prisoner by a Kazbekastani warlord for months, after he killed her husband. The quake gave her a shot at escape, but now there’s a price on her head. Decker has been asked by Tom to try to track down her husband, who he may want to recruit, and instead finds her. In the worst way possible. Decker doesn’t exactly know who she is, but knows she’s not telling the full truth. She also has no idea who he is, and thinks he might be working for the warlord. She can’t shake him, so she decides her only option is to kill him, and the only way she can manage it is by distracting him with sex. So: she goes down on him, and tries to shoot him when he comes.
Basically, my feeling is D: . It sets them up for an ongoing story arch -- I have actually read how that plays out and won’t spoil it -- but it super doesn’t work for me. Especially not because everyone instantly tells Decker it’s not his fault, it’s fine, she seduced him so he’s not guilty of anything, etc etc. But like… no. Even though she’s the one who offers sex, he’s fully aware that there’s something more going on. He doesn’t trust her but knows she’s trapped, and that he very much has the upper hand. They both know she’s desperate (Decker had set up a test to see just how scared she was of him, and the result was really scared), and they both know he can physically overpower her very easily.
I don’t care if she offered to go down on him. The power dynamics there are totally fucked up. Decker “giving in” and having sex with her wasn’t okay, and other characters letting him off the hook -- blaming Sophia, in fact -- is also not okay. The one saving grace is that while everyone else, even Sophia, says it was fine, Decker continues to blame himself for books to come. Otherwise, I would really have to hate him.
(There’s also a gratuitous, gross moment when Tess sees a photo of Sophia, who is a petite, “perfect” blond, and instantly starts mentally referring to her as a bitch. Because … women hate other women, I guess? What is that even doing there, ugh.)
Other than that… hm. The book is well paced; it’s on the shorter side for the series, and juggling fewer plots than most of the series. Though, like the fifth book, there’s an odd amount of off-page action. The most gratuitous example is when Nash comes back after going out to meet a contact one night -- the contact sold him out and tried to kill him, and Decker unexpectedly shows up to save his life. And this is all described to Tess after the fact. Ummm, maybe when someone attempts to murder the main character, that warrants a real scene? Also, at the climax, Will is literally forgotten about. They have to go back and get him as they’re on the brink of being rescued, but rather than adding to the rescue, it just feels like maybe Brockmann forgot he’d been brought in to the story and didn’t feel like going back to rewrite.
On the plus side, that one moment of random girlhate aside, I did really like Tess. She got me from the beginning, when she realized her boss was never going to let her switch to field work and they were just trying to keep her on where she was by encouraging her to reapply every year. So she called their bluff and quit. There was also the previously-mentioned moment where she calls out Nash for not really being her friend after all. And while she does make a few rookie mistakes in the field, she is ultra-competent throughout. She’s a great with their communications set up, and she’s a great hacker. (She was able to find not just Nash’s official Agency file, but the super secret secure hidden ultra file, or whatever.) And MY FAVE, at the climax, when Nash is busy freaking out that he has to go rescue her, she has already rescued herself, thanks so much. Her determination to use her skills in the field instead of on the sidelines, and her bravery and determination throughout, are all great.
So that’s kind of that. It is definitely not the strongest book in the series. It’s really just a three star affair, that I gave an extra half-star because man, Nash/Decker 5eva.
BROCKMANNISM TALLY
- USES OF THE PHRASE “SOUL-KISS”: “soul-kiss” no, “soul-sucking kiss” yes
- COUPLE WHO KNEW EACH OTHER IN HIGH SCHOOL AND/OR SHE’S HIS FRIEND’S SISTER: absent (it has been for awhile but I swear it does come back a lot in the second half of the series)
- PREGNANCY SCARE HE SECRETLY THINKS IS HOT: Pregnancy scare yes, lingering on how sexy it is, no, thank god
- SEX AT AN INOPPORTUNE TIME AND HE CAN’T PULL OUT BECAUSE REASONS: Actually kind of the opposite, in that they keep having sex and whoops Nash keeps coming in about twenty seconds (and for some reason this is hot instead of annoying; Tess is a lot nicer than I am). Plus that whole Decker/Sophia thing is pretty close to this vibe.
- SOMEONE HAS THE FLU/FOOD POISONING/OTHERWISE VOMITS FOR NO REASON: Yep - Dave Malkoff has food poisoning and is vomiting stoically for the whole first night of their mission.
- JAY LOPEZ SHOWS UP, EXPLAINS THAT HE’S A MEDIC, AND VANISHES AGAIN: Kind of. Team Sixteen has only the briefest of cameos at the end, but sure enough, one of them is a medic - no name given, but HI JAY, HI. (Actually I love that at this point, no names were given for any of the SEALs but it was pretty clear who was who - Stan was referred to as “senior chief” so that was obvious, but there was a young-looking lieutenant (hi Mike!), a medic (hi, Jay!), and later an enormous SEAL with freaky eyes (hi, Cos!).)
- JULES: Absent.
- SAM AND ALYSSA: Referred to very briefly at the end when everyone is chilling at TS Inc headquarters - they’re off on some mission, not mentioned by name, but again, it’s very clear who’s being referenced.