Genres: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Goodreads
The Kelly Group International (KGI): A super-elite, top secret, family-run business.
Qualifications: High intelligence, rock-hard body, military background.
Mission: Hostage/kidnap victim recovery. Intelligence gathering. Handling jobs the U.S. government can’t...The enigmatic Hancock has been both opponent and ally to the KGI teams for as long as they've known him. Always working a deep game, Hancock's true allegiance has never been apparent, but one thing is for certain—he never lets anything get in the way of duty.
But now, his absolute belief in the primacy of his ultimate goal is challenged by a captive he's been ordered to guard, no matter how much she suffers in her prison. She's the only woman who's ever managed to penetrate the rigid walls surrounding his icy heart, but will he allow his perplexing feelings for the beautiful victim to destroy a mission he's spent years working to complete or will he be forced to sacrifice her for “the greater good.”
** ARC provided in exchange for an honest review. **
As a fan of Ms. Banks, this was difficult for me to review. It wasn’t a bad read, don’t get me wrong. But this took me forever to read and I am a very fast reader so I began to wonder why this was taking me so long when I loved the premise of the book. The first twenty percent of the book deals with Honor. She is working in a hospital in a war torn country when it is suddenly bombed. She is the only survivor and escapes from the rubble, determined to get back home to her family somehow. She disguises herself and begins her trek, knowing that the people who bombed the hospital would try to kill her if they knew someone made it out alive. She makes it to a village, only to be found by Hancock (introduced in prior books as a KGI agent as friend and foe to the other members) who is there to rescue her. Or so we think.
So far, so good, right? So why did this take me three days to get to this part though? Because it’s repetitive and wordy. When she was making her way out of the rubble, I swear I could see the placement of every rock. When she escapes, she dyes her hair to disguise herself…I don’t know how many times I read about her disguise. The first time was cool. The second time, ok. By the third time, I don’t need to know that she’s rubbing the dirt into her skin to mask her age. Seriously, I get it. This also caused me to start skimming the book in parts because I was looking for dialogue. I felt a little starved for it at times.
Then she meets Hancock and the crew and I thought this was the end of the wordiness and repetitiveness…Nope. This poor woman goes through hell, and more than once, the same thing almost happens to her. Hell, she is repeatedly sedated. WTF?! Why?! The amount of time she was knocked out, she could have been building an actual relationship with Hancock. I’ll tell you right now,there’s very little romance in this book because the main focus is the action and violence. It makes sense because it’s a military book but it’s Maya Banks. Where’s the character connection? And once Honor meets up with the group, she sort of changes and becomes this very naive, innocent woman who sees the good in everyone and believes in happily ever afters…I just can’t right now. I’m trying not to get spoilery in my review so it’s very hard to explain how this makes absolutely no sense.
So I’ve talked a lot about what I don’t really like about the book, so let’s go to the positive. I liked Hancock and his crew. I think if I read a book just about them, doing a mission, I would have dug the book even more. It would be action packed, and I would have been satisfied. I also liked Honor,but just in the beginning. I think she had the potential to be a stronger character than she turned out to be. She digs herself out, determined to survive. I think she could have had more spunk, sass and some bad ass to her, she would have been the character I wanted to read about.
In my opinion, I think this would be a book I would borrow because I was a fan of the series and the author to find out what happens next. I didn’t hate the book but I didn’t really love it and that made me sad since Hancock’s story was the one I was really looking forward to reading.
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