This one seemed phoned-in to me. Granted, I am picky about my romance-thrillers and want them to work as thrillers and not just as romances. This one didn't for me. The perilous situations were repetitive and required the hero to be both very dumb and amazingly lucky.

The subplot with the psychiatrist didn't work for me either. He didn't behave believably to me. Same with the villain - he changed his whole MO for no reason I could see except plot requirements. ( )

It was a try. A good one but a try. First the writer blew it out of the water with the escape from Death Row. Could it be done? Yeah. But it would take more than two guards to do it. Our forensic unit was no where near that lockdown and even with two of us working together, we wouldn't have made it. The cameras are everywhere that might be a possible entrance. Anywhere else in the prison I would have bought it but Death Row? No. It needed a much better plot to fly on that count.

The book itself showed serious flaws on the police side on the part of the writer. Things that could have never happened. I understand he needed this to fly and picked those parts because of it. But they didn't work for anyone slightly familiar with police or prisons.

The story line was good. The back up [facts] was very bad. The look at the characters was good but it dragged on way too long as if the book couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be Romance or Mystery. As a Romance it would have got a 3 star. As a Mystery it wasn't a 1 star because it was the bare bones idea of a mystery with the plot incomplete. I decided to rate it as a Romance.

It showed promise that it simply didn't live up to because it lacked the essential background to make it fly. Things happen that can't happen and there in is the problem. The writer's job is to know how it works then convince us that X can happen. J.P. Bowie didn't do that here.


( )

Lots of backstory revealed and more than once, I doubted this was the first book in the series. There were references to events that weren't in the huge flashback and, now I see this is the first in the series, I'm a little annoyed by its inclusion, particularly as it served no purpose other than to confuse me. A star off a 4 star read for that. ( )