"Holy shit." She swallowed hard. "I've won the lottery."

Burn by Linda Howard

My review:

I love Linda Howard’s books so this one was disappointing .

This book is about Jennifer Redwine, A young hard-working girls who works for the local meat packer in Kansas. Then she wins the lottery. No spoilers here… Not yet anyway… The premise is actually very interesting as is Jennifer.

I mean let’s face it there are not to many of us who will win the lottery and I’ve often wondered what it would mean if I did or if people I know did. What would that mean for us? How would our lives change? How would we change?

I’d like to say I found the answers in this book but I did not. And now here come:
Spoilers!

The book really didn’t tell me anything about Jennifer nor did it really answer any of these questions. Instead the book jumps forward in time and we find that Jennifer has become beautiful successful and of course rich. Very , very rich. The book then more soon to a crime drama with a love story interspersed taking place on a boat. Not exactly what I expected.

While there was nothing inherently wrong with this book, I think that the central premise was so intriguing that it could’ve been a really great one and it stayed with Jen’s life and the ramifications of winning the lottery.

One kind of thinks that’s what it’s going to do in the beginning as we see her friends reactions to her good fortune. We see how differently people start to treat her because of her newly found wealth. I should stress that the beginning of this book is a five.

I was baffled by the big jump in time. And the crime story..the mystery..wasn't all that interesting. Burn turns into a romantic suspense book but it wasn't suspenseful and all I could feel was let down that we do not know what happened in the months after Jenna won the lottery. LOL. I just wanted the book to go back in time and start over, with a different focus. I was extremely frustrated.

So..verdict..not for me at all. ( )

seemed like two separate books. The first half was interesting with her winning the lottery and how she learns to deal with that. Then suddenly it is romantic suspense. The whole first half of the book had nothing to do with the second half except to set it up so she's rich enough to go on the cruise. So that could have been done with a paragraph of "Having won the lottery.." and on with the story. ( )

Cael Traylor is a super-hero: he's gorgeous, speaks lots of languages (including "Southern"), has limitless martial skills, and was trained by no less than Mossad. Nowadays, he and his team - all of whom are unusually good-looking, smart, well-heeled and fun to be around - take assignments in surveillance. Jenner Redwine is a former blue-collar worker who won one of the biggest lotteries anywhere and is now rich enough to buy a small country, but she hasn't found a place where she seems to fit. Jenner gets in Cael's way, literally - his team was supposed to be in her stateroom on a cruise, but the paranoid bad guy arranges a swap at the last minute. Cael solves this in true "Romanceland" style: her friend is kidnapped onshore, and Cael kidnaps her on the cruise. She must pretend to be in love, giving him an excuse to be in her stateroom, and there are endless situations that develop, including the feisty heroine handcuffed to the muscular hero all night.

That said, if you are a Howard fan this book will probably be a struggle to get through in the middle of the book, but keep going. The end is good. ( )

Good book. Good characters. Enjoyed it the whole thing! ( )

I've been disappointed in most of LH's more recent releases, but I was pleasantly surprised with this one. It reminded me quite a bit of All the Queen's Men. Kind of light on the romance and heavy on the storyline, but still oddly satisfying.

I was concerned that the resolution between Jenner and Cael wouldn't be quite satisfactory, but I was pleased with the way it turned out. I felt we got to know both characters and they worked well together.

The storyline was interesting b/c it took place almost exclusively on a cruise ship. The suspense plot didn't contain much mystery - the villain was introduced almost immediately - but it still worked. I'm sure if I thought long enough I could find plenty of holes in the story, but the truth is I was entertained enough that I didn't care. ( )