“It’s a romance,” I was told flatly when I was asked to review this book. And you know what? It is. Actually two romances and two family dramas. So why am I reviewing it here? Isn’t the whole point of Mystery Women, well, mystery? The crime/thriller genre, in all or any of its incarnations and sub-genres? I thought so.
The thing is, the book is sold as a thriller. The little teaser line on the front cover says A Deadly Terror Threatens a Town. Only One Man Has The Power To stop Him. And in thriller terms, it starts promisingly enough: Our Hero, pride of the US Navy and leader of crack special ops team, beats off multiple bad guys and escorts unco-operative VIP out of hostile territory, incurring career-threatening injuries in the process. But that episode lasts a mere 3000 words, and its only relevance to the rest of the story is the career-threatening injuries. From there until another few thousand words from the end, the thriller element puts in only an occasional guest appearance, and the deadly terrorist flagged up on the cover hardly appears at all.
What Brockmann does, she does very well. She tells a great page-turning story; I finished it in a couple of evenings. The characters, major and minor, are engaging; I laughed with them, rooted for them, shed the odd tear for them and cheered when they all finally stopped wilfully misunderstanding each other and bowed to the inevitable conclusion the reader spotted back in chapter 3.
The sex is terrific too – both the electric, don’t-you-just-wish couplings of Our Hero and his girl and the tender, tentative moves of a pair of adolescent misfits.
One of the family drama strands goes back to World War 2, and here Brockmann shows that she really knows how to draw the reader in, drip-feeding just enough at a time to make me itch with frustration and ache to discover that secret which had been hidden for sixty years. And when the action eventually happens, it’s pacy and full of hold-your-breath tension, with a brilliant inevitable-but still-a-surprise climax.
So Suzanne Brockmann is no doubt more than capable of picking up the thriller genre and running with it. Our Hero’s special ops team, loyal to the last, even when the choice is commitment to him or keeping their jobs, are arguably the least well developed characters in the book, but they’re still sharp enough to carry through into a real action adventure in which they play more than minor featured roles.
She writes up a storm too. The thing about good style is you don’t notice it; it’s so fused with the narrative that you’re just swept along. I was. So, final verdict: great book, and I’ll be looking for more by this author. But the cover lies. A thriller it’s not. Well, only slightly.
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Lynn Fredericks