DARK OF NIGHT (Troubleshooters #14; three stars)
Taking on the world's deadliest criminals is what the elite security force Troubleshooters Incorporated does best. But now they face a new and powerful threat from their most lethal enemy yet--a shadowy government outfit known only as The Agency.
For years, operative James Nash has performed ultra-covert "Black Ops" missions for The Agency, but when he decide to walk away from their dirty work, his corrupt bosses aren't about to let him go. After Nash is nearly assassinated, Troubleshooters team leader Lawrence Decker launches a skillful deception to neutralize the threat and protect his friend. With the FBI's help, Decker fakes Nash's death, then brings him to a safe house with his fiancee, Tess Bailey, to recover from his injuries and strategize their next move.
Only a handful of people know that Nash is still alive--and fellow Troubleshooters Dave Malkoff, Sophia Ghaffari, and receptionist Tracy Shapiro aren't among them. Believing that Nash is dead and that Decker has begun a romantic relationship with Tess, Sophia settles for second best and begins a love affair with Dave, who has adored her for years. But Tracy puts two and two together, discovering the truth about Nash--much to Decker's dismay.
As passions flare, Decker struggles to keep his scheme afloat, and to keep Nash alive. But when he finds himself targeted for death, the game turns even more perilous, and Sophia, Tracy, and Dave are swept into the deadly play. Under fire and racing to unmask their relentless adversary, the Troubleshooters know that the closer they get, the greater the risks. But sacrifices and consequences come with the territory. Forced to choose between love and loyalty, they are no longer just solving a crime--they're fighting for survival.
OH MY GOD, THAT’S SO MUCH STUFF. AGAIN.
I initially read this book completely out of order in the series, because a friend was like THE DECKER/TRACY SEX SCENES THO, and I did indeed enjoy them. But I disliked the book overall, because I had literally no idea what was going on -- I hadn’t read any of the other books leading up to it, so I didn’t even know most of the characters were, and I could not keep Decker, Nash, and Dave straight. Which makes the book completely incomprehensible.
But! I reread it for this project and it made waaaay more sense the second time around. Unfortunately, it was still not very good, but at least I knew who was who.
I: The plot of this book doesn’t work at all.
II: BUT WHO CARES, BECAUSE DECKER/TRACY THO.
III: Also Dave/Sophia I guess.
IV: Other bits ‘n pieces
I: So okay. The plot of this book was really kicked off in INTO THE FIRE, with all of Nash’s weird behavior, culminating in the revelation that the Agency has been blackmailing him into doing black op assassinations, and Decker and Jules helping Nash fake his own death to throw the badguys off, and to buy themselves time to figure out who those badguys are and catch them. This book picks up only a couple of weeks later. Nash is still in a safehouse (provided by Robin, actually) recovering from nearly being murdered; only Tess, Decker, Jules, and Robin know that he’s really alive. However: 1) Tracy figures it out, so Decker decides she has to be brought into the safehouse, too -- only for them to be attacked before they can arrive; and 2) the badguys kidnap Dave, hoping that he can confirm Nash is secretly alive and lead them to him.
The plot of this book...really, it’s a mess.
The issue rests, as I said previously, on the fact that the Agency makes for a crappy badguy. We know nothing about the Agency, including what its alleged purpose is. It has the black ops department, true, but also seems to do legitimate above-board spy work (is there such a thing?), since Decker, Nash, and Tess all worked there and it’s, like, on their resumes and whatnot. What does it exist for? Why aren’t these people just CIA agents like Dave, or whatever? Shrug. But I’d be willing to just go with it, why not, except that the real problem isn’t that the Agency is a nonsense organization, the real issue is that the badguys aren’t characters and we don’t care about them.
It turns out, the baddies are a new group of people who now run the Agency - they were put in charge (by whom? okay) shortly before Decker and Nash departed - and they’re political partisans who tried to have Decker killed because they didn’t like his bumper sticker (no, really). And the reason they’re trying to kill Nash is because he was part of an op from which one of them embezzled millions of dollars, which also aided and abetted terrorists. They wanted to kill Nash before he could put it all together, and since they don’t believe he’s dead, they’re coming after everyone close to him to try to bring him out of hiding.
The issue is, we don’t know who these people are. They aren’t characters, just names. We never see anyone interact with them. We never learn anything about them. We didn’t see the op that this all stemmed from, or any of the other ones Nash mentions. So the badguys are total non-entities, which saps a lot of tension from the book. (And also … why hadn’t they already killed Nash? They are consistently one or two steps ahead of everyone else and seem to have unlimited resources and henchpeople. Why send Nash out on assignments and play mind games with him and not just, you know, murder him? But okay, sure.)
It doesn’t help that no one really actually investigates anything. The badguys, whoever they are, keep trying to kill/kidnap people, and everyone else just… reacts. The only thing our team has done proactively is fake Nash’s death, and that wasn’t even in this book. Everything else is responding to the attempt to murder Decker, Tracy, Jules, and Tess at a hotel; to Dave’s kidnapping; to the bug found on their laptop. Tracy and Dr. Heismann figure out that their ex-boyfriends are actually the same person, who has been blackmailing the doctor, which leads them to find Dave, so that’s something. But as for figuring out who at the Agency was trying to kill Nash, and why?
Literally Nash writes a list of people he knew. And Tess reads it. And then they circle some names. The badguys have been found out! THAT IS NOT A GOOD STORY.
Meanwhile, the kidnapping Dave thing is also bizarrely convoluted. They wanted to take someone close to Nash -- and really? They went with Dave? Okay. Presumably he was easier to nab that Tess or Decker would have been, but it was firmly established in the previous book that Nash actually only sorta kinda vaguely likes Dave at best, but sure. Anyway, they stabbed him with a bacteria-messy knife and tried to frame him for the murder of his ex-girlfriend (another character we never met). The frame-up didn’t work and it’s not clear what they were hoping to get from it if it had worked, but they knew the knife wound would get infected, so he was forced to go back to another hospital, where they were able to kidnap him (why didn’t they just kidnap him in the first place?) and torture him for information. Honestly, the Dave plotline could pretty much have been lifted out of the book; the climax would have to happen differently -- idk, it would probably have required the other characters to actually proactively do anything -- but yeah. Hm.
It’s super not great.
This is a long book, that is actually really boring. There is just a ton of stuff in it -- there’s also some Nash stuff and even some Jules stuff -- but the suspense plot falls almost totally flat. Alas.
II: But!! Decker!!! Or more precisely, TRACY!!!!
So it turns out that among Decker’s many, many issues is this: he’s a total prude, which is a big problem for him, because he’s also a total sub and a total masochist. He has never figured this out about himself, just always been unsatisfied with his sex life (and, in fact, was celibate for many years), and ultra freaked out at himself for having actually gotten off on the fact that Sophia tried to kill him as she was going down on him. Not on the BJ itself. On the attempted murder. Of him. Because he’s into that.
WHO WOULDA THUNK? NOT ME!
Okay, I am super biased because I find that particular dynamic crazy hot, but it’s also a really awesome and unusual decision (at least in this series) to have a male romantic lead who wants to be dominated. Especially because Decker, like all the dudes in this series, is a total alpha male -- which is part of why he has trouble accepting this about himself. But it’s what gets him going, and why he and Tracy are gonna work together, and oh man I would like to read a hundred more sex scenes between them, please.
And that doesn’t even get into how great Tracy is. TRACY IS THE GREATEST. Like, I don’t love this book, obviously -- but Tracy is my favorite female character in the series. In this book alone…
And of course, all that comes together when she is the one who breaks through Decker’s tightly wound angst, realizes what was really going on for him with the Sophia thing (which he hasn’t even figured out himself), and forces him to confront it. He goes from skeptical to starry-eyed instantly, because once again, Tracy is right. In this case, in the sexiest way possible.
Seriously, I can not get over how frigging hot her sex scenes with Decker are, once she realizes what he wants is for someone else to take control. She effortlessly switches into dominatrix mode, giving him orders about what to do and what not to do, forcing him to focus on the physical instead of getting all twisted up about it in his head. It’s all very playful and soft-core -- I assume things for the two of them will get more intense with time and experience -- but holy crap, it is smoking. I wasn’t joking before. Decker has always been really boring, and yet I would read a hundred more pages of him and Tracy having sex.
III: Other couples who appear in this book.
THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK, seriously, zomg.
Dave and Sophia. So, they smooched at the end of the previous book, and this one picks up where it left off. The two of them get awfully hot and heavy awfully quickly, but hey, Dave’s been in love for years, and Sophia has just come to the realization that she never genuinely loved Decker -- she fooled herself into think she did, because she knew he’d never reciprocate her feelings, so loving him was safe while she was recovering from all of the trauma in her earlier life.
I enjoy Sophia a lot. But after Dave’s lovely character development in the previous book, he just… went downhill here. What had always been interesting about him was that he was a reluctant leader, not an alpha male. He also had always managed to be in love with Sophia and still be her best friend without ever delving into creepy Nice Guy territory, which was an impressive feat on Brockmann’s part -- Dave valued her friendship in and of itself, and wasn’t a passive-aggressive jackass about his feelings for her. But in this book, all of that is replaced by macho alpha male Dave. Gone is the grumpy IT guy; in his place is an unkillable action hero who could be interchanged with pretty much anyone other dude in the series.
So, you know, I’m happy they got their happy ending. But they don’t really do anything for me as a couple.
Nash and Tess. This is basically a less interesting re-tread of FLASHPOINT, in that Nash spends the whole time bemoaning how dangerous he is and that he’s no good for Tess, and she determinedly sticks by him anyway. He worries that she’s in danger; she proves herself uber-competent at every turn. And the thing is… I like Tess, but I also find her pretty dull. I am always glad when the women in this series can keep up with the dudes, action-wise, but Tess doesn’t have much personality beyond general competence and niceness. And Nash I enjoy more as a concept than an actual character. There’s nothing about them together that particularly grips me.
But at least they got to bring in some nice moments with Sam, I guess. Sam convinces Nash to open up to Tess and at least tell her that he’s struggling, even if he can’t actually talk to her about what he’s struggling with. And that he, too, angsts every time Alyssa does something dangerous -- but hey, he knows she is capable and kick-ass, so he’s angsting, but he still has to trust her to get the job done. Nash more or less learns that lesson. It’s fine. Boring, but fine.
Jules and Robin. Are perfect and beautiful. SOB. (No, but really: the baddies murder some people specifically to get to Jules, and he struggles with it a lot, and goes to Robin for comfort. They also have to pull Robin out of filming to protect him, and the cover story is that he’s started drinking again and is going back to rehab, and Jules angsts over that, too, and Robin comforts him again. They are only a very minor thread in the book, and Robin in particular is barely in it, but their scenes together are excellent. Why yes I would also take a hundred more pages of Robin comforting a crying Jules, please and thank you.)
IV: Also...
Ken has a cameo, his first in a long long time! AND THEN HE GETS SHOT IN THE CHEST AND ALMOST DIES. >:( >:( >:( I mean, he DOESN’T die, he’s fine, but NO I LOVE HIM KEN IS THE BEST ONE. Also, he and Dave have a nice moment where Ken’s like, “Yep, us nerdy dudes need to stick together. Also have you noticed that super hot petite blondes love us?” Heh.
Tom also gets shot. In the head. HE’S FINE TOO.
I enjoy that in both cases, everyone is like, “Well, that sucks for the hospital, seeing as how the two of them are going to regain consciousness and be really pissed off and immediately both try to get out of bed and go find Dave.” AND THEY DO. (They do try. Kelly and Savannah, off page, presumably talk them both down. “Honey, you just had surgery to reconstruct your heart, maybe stay in bed for a few hours?” “NO I’M FINE.” Or at least, I assume that’s how the conversation goes.)
Aaand other than that, let’s see. We get a glimpse into Sam and Alyssa’s married life - I can’t remember for sure, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen Ash, their baby. On the one hand, I’m still frustrated that the character focus is almost exclusively on Sam (as he tries to help Nash save his marriage) with Alyssa getting very little page time. On the other hand, one of the things we do, finally, finally get to see is Alyssa actually being team leader; she’s the one who makes the call to bring Robin into the safe house, and that means talking Jules down and taking control of the whole situation. It’s a small moment, but it’s actually really great.
So that’s that. This book was long, and not the best, but it sure had its moments. (Those moments were the sex scenes. And Jules crying.)
BROCKMANNISM TALLY
For years, operative James Nash has performed ultra-covert "Black Ops" missions for The Agency, but when he decide to walk away from their dirty work, his corrupt bosses aren't about to let him go. After Nash is nearly assassinated, Troubleshooters team leader Lawrence Decker launches a skillful deception to neutralize the threat and protect his friend. With the FBI's help, Decker fakes Nash's death, then brings him to a safe house with his fiancee, Tess Bailey, to recover from his injuries and strategize their next move.
Only a handful of people know that Nash is still alive--and fellow Troubleshooters Dave Malkoff, Sophia Ghaffari, and receptionist Tracy Shapiro aren't among them. Believing that Nash is dead and that Decker has begun a romantic relationship with Tess, Sophia settles for second best and begins a love affair with Dave, who has adored her for years. But Tracy puts two and two together, discovering the truth about Nash--much to Decker's dismay.
As passions flare, Decker struggles to keep his scheme afloat, and to keep Nash alive. But when he finds himself targeted for death, the game turns even more perilous, and Sophia, Tracy, and Dave are swept into the deadly play. Under fire and racing to unmask their relentless adversary, the Troubleshooters know that the closer they get, the greater the risks. But sacrifices and consequences come with the territory. Forced to choose between love and loyalty, they are no longer just solving a crime--they're fighting for survival.
OH MY GOD, THAT’S SO MUCH STUFF. AGAIN.
I initially read this book completely out of order in the series, because a friend was like THE DECKER/TRACY SEX SCENES THO, and I did indeed enjoy them. But I disliked the book overall, because I had literally no idea what was going on -- I hadn’t read any of the other books leading up to it, so I didn’t even know most of the characters were, and I could not keep Decker, Nash, and Dave straight. Which makes the book completely incomprehensible.
But! I reread it for this project and it made waaaay more sense the second time around. Unfortunately, it was still not very good, but at least I knew who was who.
I: The plot of this book doesn’t work at all.
II: BUT WHO CARES, BECAUSE DECKER/TRACY THO.
III: Also Dave/Sophia I guess.
IV: Other bits ‘n pieces
I: So okay. The plot of this book was really kicked off in INTO THE FIRE, with all of Nash’s weird behavior, culminating in the revelation that the Agency has been blackmailing him into doing black op assassinations, and Decker and Jules helping Nash fake his own death to throw the badguys off, and to buy themselves time to figure out who those badguys are and catch them. This book picks up only a couple of weeks later. Nash is still in a safehouse (provided by Robin, actually) recovering from nearly being murdered; only Tess, Decker, Jules, and Robin know that he’s really alive. However: 1) Tracy figures it out, so Decker decides she has to be brought into the safehouse, too -- only for them to be attacked before they can arrive; and 2) the badguys kidnap Dave, hoping that he can confirm Nash is secretly alive and lead them to him.
The plot of this book...really, it’s a mess.
The issue rests, as I said previously, on the fact that the Agency makes for a crappy badguy. We know nothing about the Agency, including what its alleged purpose is. It has the black ops department, true, but also seems to do legitimate above-board spy work (is there such a thing?), since Decker, Nash, and Tess all worked there and it’s, like, on their resumes and whatnot. What does it exist for? Why aren’t these people just CIA agents like Dave, or whatever? Shrug. But I’d be willing to just go with it, why not, except that the real problem isn’t that the Agency is a nonsense organization, the real issue is that the badguys aren’t characters and we don’t care about them.
It turns out, the baddies are a new group of people who now run the Agency - they were put in charge (by whom? okay) shortly before Decker and Nash departed - and they’re political partisans who tried to have Decker killed because they didn’t like his bumper sticker (no, really). And the reason they’re trying to kill Nash is because he was part of an op from which one of them embezzled millions of dollars, which also aided and abetted terrorists. They wanted to kill Nash before he could put it all together, and since they don’t believe he’s dead, they’re coming after everyone close to him to try to bring him out of hiding.
The issue is, we don’t know who these people are. They aren’t characters, just names. We never see anyone interact with them. We never learn anything about them. We didn’t see the op that this all stemmed from, or any of the other ones Nash mentions. So the badguys are total non-entities, which saps a lot of tension from the book. (And also … why hadn’t they already killed Nash? They are consistently one or two steps ahead of everyone else and seem to have unlimited resources and henchpeople. Why send Nash out on assignments and play mind games with him and not just, you know, murder him? But okay, sure.)
It doesn’t help that no one really actually investigates anything. The badguys, whoever they are, keep trying to kill/kidnap people, and everyone else just… reacts. The only thing our team has done proactively is fake Nash’s death, and that wasn’t even in this book. Everything else is responding to the attempt to murder Decker, Tracy, Jules, and Tess at a hotel; to Dave’s kidnapping; to the bug found on their laptop. Tracy and Dr. Heismann figure out that their ex-boyfriends are actually the same person, who has been blackmailing the doctor, which leads them to find Dave, so that’s something. But as for figuring out who at the Agency was trying to kill Nash, and why?
Literally Nash writes a list of people he knew. And Tess reads it. And then they circle some names. The badguys have been found out! THAT IS NOT A GOOD STORY.
Meanwhile, the kidnapping Dave thing is also bizarrely convoluted. They wanted to take someone close to Nash -- and really? They went with Dave? Okay. Presumably he was easier to nab that Tess or Decker would have been, but it was firmly established in the previous book that Nash actually only sorta kinda vaguely likes Dave at best, but sure. Anyway, they stabbed him with a bacteria-messy knife and tried to frame him for the murder of his ex-girlfriend (another character we never met). The frame-up didn’t work and it’s not clear what they were hoping to get from it if it had worked, but they knew the knife wound would get infected, so he was forced to go back to another hospital, where they were able to kidnap him (why didn’t they just kidnap him in the first place?) and torture him for information. Honestly, the Dave plotline could pretty much have been lifted out of the book; the climax would have to happen differently -- idk, it would probably have required the other characters to actually proactively do anything -- but yeah. Hm.
It’s super not great.
This is a long book, that is actually really boring. There is just a ton of stuff in it -- there’s also some Nash stuff and even some Jules stuff -- but the suspense plot falls almost totally flat. Alas.
II: But!! Decker!!! Or more precisely, TRACY!!!!
So it turns out that among Decker’s many, many issues is this: he’s a total prude, which is a big problem for him, because he’s also a total sub and a total masochist. He has never figured this out about himself, just always been unsatisfied with his sex life (and, in fact, was celibate for many years), and ultra freaked out at himself for having actually gotten off on the fact that Sophia tried to kill him as she was going down on him. Not on the BJ itself. On the attempted murder. Of him. Because he’s into that.
WHO WOULDA THUNK? NOT ME!
Okay, I am super biased because I find that particular dynamic crazy hot, but it’s also a really awesome and unusual decision (at least in this series) to have a male romantic lead who wants to be dominated. Especially because Decker, like all the dudes in this series, is a total alpha male -- which is part of why he has trouble accepting this about himself. But it’s what gets him going, and why he and Tracy are gonna work together, and oh man I would like to read a hundred more sex scenes between them, please.
And that doesn’t even get into how great Tracy is. TRACY IS THE GREATEST. Like, I don’t love this book, obviously -- but Tracy is my favorite female character in the series. In this book alone…
- In a company full of seasoned, experienced SpecWar operatives, she -- the receptionist -- is the only one who figures out that Nash is still alive. Because she sees Decker moving Nash’s coffee cup, and intuits that that’s not how Decker should be reacting to Nash’s death, and then sees Decker grabbing some clothes from Nash’s apartment and realizes that it is, in fact, clothing for Nash.
- Decker then tries to convince her that’s NOT what’s going on, but she sees he’s also been using a bug sweeper as he works. He tries to pretend it’s to test the apartment’s wiring. She calls him on his bullshit - writing it down in case there ARE bugs - because she’s not an idiot, and actually, she’s in charge of all of TS’s equipment. Yes, she knows what a bug sweeper is, thanks so much.
- She has grown up from INTO THE STORM so much. Back then, she was attempting to manipulate a guy she didn’t actually love into proposing to her, and then having a one night stand to feel better about herself. Now, she figures out what she really wants and holds out for it. She asks for things with words. She says how she feels. SHE ACTUALLY COMMUNICATES. She is maybe the only character in the entire series who does that, tbh.
- She refuses to be apologetic about the fact that she has a giant green dildo in her shower. She is a woman who owns her sexuality, and her sexuality is not centered around any guy. How freaking rad is that?
- She is the only one who is not impressed by Decker’s… Decker-ness. She reached out to him in the previous book, to his great confusion, because she was the only one who noticed he doesn’t seem to have a support network. And she is not at all intimidated by him, and frankly, not that impressed by him. Like I said way, WAY back in my review of OUT OF CONTROL, I am a sucker for pairings where the dude is all “I AM A SCARY MONSTER, RAAAAR” and the lady is all “That’s nice, honey, now take your pants off.” And Tracy could literally say “That’s nice, now take your pants off,” and it would be 100% in character. In fact, that’s pretty damn close to her actual dialogue.
- She does all of the above without losing her breezy chatterbox attributes - she knows people thinks she talks too much, she’s working on it, but she always has a point and her point is often hella smart. Plus, she still loves clothes and shopping and fashion. Basically, the things about Tracy that are traditionally feminine cause people to underestimate her (sadly realistically), but anyone who does so is going to have another think coming. Tracy is extremely intuitive and smart.
- TRACY IS THE BEST ONE.
And of course, all that comes together when she is the one who breaks through Decker’s tightly wound angst, realizes what was really going on for him with the Sophia thing (which he hasn’t even figured out himself), and forces him to confront it. He goes from skeptical to starry-eyed instantly, because once again, Tracy is right. In this case, in the sexiest way possible.
Seriously, I can not get over how frigging hot her sex scenes with Decker are, once she realizes what he wants is for someone else to take control. She effortlessly switches into dominatrix mode, giving him orders about what to do and what not to do, forcing him to focus on the physical instead of getting all twisted up about it in his head. It’s all very playful and soft-core -- I assume things for the two of them will get more intense with time and experience -- but holy crap, it is smoking. I wasn’t joking before. Decker has always been really boring, and yet I would read a hundred more pages of him and Tracy having sex.
III: Other couples who appear in this book.
THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK, seriously, zomg.
Dave and Sophia. So, they smooched at the end of the previous book, and this one picks up where it left off. The two of them get awfully hot and heavy awfully quickly, but hey, Dave’s been in love for years, and Sophia has just come to the realization that she never genuinely loved Decker -- she fooled herself into think she did, because she knew he’d never reciprocate her feelings, so loving him was safe while she was recovering from all of the trauma in her earlier life.
I enjoy Sophia a lot. But after Dave’s lovely character development in the previous book, he just… went downhill here. What had always been interesting about him was that he was a reluctant leader, not an alpha male. He also had always managed to be in love with Sophia and still be her best friend without ever delving into creepy Nice Guy territory, which was an impressive feat on Brockmann’s part -- Dave valued her friendship in and of itself, and wasn’t a passive-aggressive jackass about his feelings for her. But in this book, all of that is replaced by macho alpha male Dave. Gone is the grumpy IT guy; in his place is an unkillable action hero who could be interchanged with pretty much anyone other dude in the series.
So, you know, I’m happy they got their happy ending. But they don’t really do anything for me as a couple.
Nash and Tess. This is basically a less interesting re-tread of FLASHPOINT, in that Nash spends the whole time bemoaning how dangerous he is and that he’s no good for Tess, and she determinedly sticks by him anyway. He worries that she’s in danger; she proves herself uber-competent at every turn. And the thing is… I like Tess, but I also find her pretty dull. I am always glad when the women in this series can keep up with the dudes, action-wise, but Tess doesn’t have much personality beyond general competence and niceness. And Nash I enjoy more as a concept than an actual character. There’s nothing about them together that particularly grips me.
But at least they got to bring in some nice moments with Sam, I guess. Sam convinces Nash to open up to Tess and at least tell her that he’s struggling, even if he can’t actually talk to her about what he’s struggling with. And that he, too, angsts every time Alyssa does something dangerous -- but hey, he knows she is capable and kick-ass, so he’s angsting, but he still has to trust her to get the job done. Nash more or less learns that lesson. It’s fine. Boring, but fine.
Jules and Robin. Are perfect and beautiful. SOB. (No, but really: the baddies murder some people specifically to get to Jules, and he struggles with it a lot, and goes to Robin for comfort. They also have to pull Robin out of filming to protect him, and the cover story is that he’s started drinking again and is going back to rehab, and Jules angsts over that, too, and Robin comforts him again. They are only a very minor thread in the book, and Robin in particular is barely in it, but their scenes together are excellent. Why yes I would also take a hundred more pages of Robin comforting a crying Jules, please and thank you.)
IV: Also...
Ken has a cameo, his first in a long long time! AND THEN HE GETS SHOT IN THE CHEST AND ALMOST DIES. >:( >:( >:( I mean, he DOESN’T die, he’s fine, but NO I LOVE HIM KEN IS THE BEST ONE. Also, he and Dave have a nice moment where Ken’s like, “Yep, us nerdy dudes need to stick together. Also have you noticed that super hot petite blondes love us?” Heh.
Tom also gets shot. In the head. HE’S FINE TOO.
I enjoy that in both cases, everyone is like, “Well, that sucks for the hospital, seeing as how the two of them are going to regain consciousness and be really pissed off and immediately both try to get out of bed and go find Dave.” AND THEY DO. (They do try. Kelly and Savannah, off page, presumably talk them both down. “Honey, you just had surgery to reconstruct your heart, maybe stay in bed for a few hours?” “NO I’M FINE.” Or at least, I assume that’s how the conversation goes.)
Aaand other than that, let’s see. We get a glimpse into Sam and Alyssa’s married life - I can’t remember for sure, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen Ash, their baby. On the one hand, I’m still frustrated that the character focus is almost exclusively on Sam (as he tries to help Nash save his marriage) with Alyssa getting very little page time. On the other hand, one of the things we do, finally, finally get to see is Alyssa actually being team leader; she’s the one who makes the call to bring Robin into the safe house, and that means talking Jules down and taking control of the whole situation. It’s a small moment, but it’s actually really great.
So that’s that. This book was long, and not the best, but it sure had its moments. (Those moments were the sex scenes. And Jules crying.)
BROCKMANNISM TALLY
- USES OF THE PHRASE “SOUL-KISS”: Oddly none. And no soul-sucking kisses, either.
- COUPLE WHO KNEW EACH OTHER IN HIGH SCHOOL AND/OR SHE’S HIS FRIEND’S SISTER: Absent
- PREGNANCY SCARE HE SECRETLY THINKS IS HOT: Scare, not exactly - Sophia is, in fact, pregnant. And of course Dave is into it, though thank god he doesn’t linger on it the way Izzy did in the previous book.
- SEX AT AN INOPPORTUNE TIME AND HE CAN’T PULL OUT BECAUSE REASONS: Decker and Tracy get interrupted while nekkid just before sex at one point, which is pretty inopportune; later, when they do get it on, it’s in the office and she can’t find her underwear after. Jules spots it in Decker’s office later, to Decker’s complete mortification. So inopportune, yes. Heh. (Tracy also tells Decker that she has definitely seen Tom and Kelly in a supply closet, and knows full well what Sam and Alyssa are doing when they ask her to hold their calls. SO MUCH SEX IN THE TROUBLESHOOTERS OFFICE, my god.)
- SOMEONE HAS THE FLU/FOOD POISONING/OTHERWISE VOMITS FOR NO REASON: No flu or food poisoning that I recall, but I believe Sophia has some morning sickness, and a cop throws up when he sees a dead body.
- JAY LOPEZ SHOWS UP, EXPLAINS THAT HE’S A MEDIC, AND VANISHES AGAIN:Yep! Again, Jay actually gets to be a supporting character here, though briefly. But he does hit on Tracy. Which does not super work out for him. Much like it also did not work out to flirt with Lindsey. Or Teri. Oh, Jay. You will never, ever get the girl.
- JULES: Present and accounted for. ;_____;
- SAM AND ALYSSA: Also there!