Review: Great story with a lot of engaging characters
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 10, 2012
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 8/10PROS:- The plot is engrossing. I didn't love the first 10% or so (because one of the main characters gets kidnapped and is in captivity for several days), but once Matt got rescued, I was hooked.- Smith manages to portray Matt in horrible circumstances, cowering and terrified, without making him appear weak. The character of Matt could easily have fallen into the Damsel in Distress category, but despite his helplessness at the beginning of the story, he shows in later scenes that he's really quite courageous.- Travis is super sexy. Stoic and loyal, deadly and ripped. And naturally, he has a heart of gold.- More than once, the story initiated feelings of fierce patriotism in me. Whether or not people agree with the policies of the American military, I think they should agree on this: the members of our armed services can be--and often are--awesome.CONS:- The writing doesn't flow as smoothly as I wanted it to. It has grammatical errors ("the plan...didn't require Matt to do hardly anything"; "there was...two parts to the mission") as well as a lot of simplistic statements of the characters' feelings ("Matt liked this very much"). There are also instances of repetition--sometimes of ideas, sometimes of phrases, sometimes just of individual words (like this: "Tony found this pretty funny because his degree came in pretty handy sometimes with the demolition work they sometimes got called on to do"). A lot of this could have been remedied by tighter editing.- The first scene we get from Travis's point of view is over halfway through the book. I'm glad that I *did* get to see some things from his perspective, but I was craving that perspective much earlier in the story. The POV sometimes jumps briefly into the heads of secondary characters, too, which I don't typically mind if each scene is confined to one character's head. That's not the case here.Overall comments: This is a great story, and I would not have hesitated to give it five stars if the writing had been just a little bit better quality. I liked the characters individually, and I liked them as a couple. It's not for you if you're looking for erotica; the sex scenes are fade-to-black.