Unstuck Pages

The man of her fantasies is finally hers. Sort of…

Two things haunt forensic anthropologist Hazel MacLeod: the bones of victims of genocide she examines for her work, and former SEAL Sean Logan’s rejection. But within days of moving to her cousin’s estate to take a much needed break, she finds herself faced with both.

First, she’s called in to examine a mass grave in Virginia, then, her politician cousin receives a threatening letter and insists Hazel needs around the clock protection—from none other than Sean Logan. To make matters worse, because the threat to her is classified, Hazel and Sean must pretend to be lovers to hide that he’s her bodyguard.

Sean has spent years trying to avoid his boss’s sexy cousin, but now he’s guarding her twenty-four/seven and even bringing her as his date to a romantic destination wedding. As the heat between them intensifies, Sean can’t lose sight of the danger that brought them together. But when bullets start flying, new questions arise. Are the senator’s political rivals really behind the threat, or is someone trying to silence Hazel from speaking for the dead?

The unfulfilled, unrequited type stories are what I tend to go after and ‘Silent Evidence’—touted by Rachel Grant as such—was one that I immediately pounced on when it came. Then again, reading Grant’s works is always an enthralling, absorbing experience.

‘Silent Evidence’ isn’t exactly a standalone to begin with. Characters from Grant’s previous books do play a substantial part in here—with the many references to the events of previous books providing much-needed context for how well we can understand what’s really going on—this far into the series where Grant’s speculative ‘world-building’ so to speak, is sufficiently developed to entangle everyone else apart from her protagonists in the building mystery and suspense.

The romance itself however, is fairly straightforward: Hazel MacLeod has always wanted Sean Logan, whose rebuffs have not only put her on edge and eager to avoid him, but that circumstances have somehow conspired to put them back in each other’s orbits when it becomes clear that there are odds and ends that don’t add up—with more than a touch of danger that sweeps in.

Like all Grant books, her plot and characters are layered and complex, with a hard, detailed look into fascinating fields such forensic anthropology, political manoeuvrings and a thread of racial tension woven through it all. But it did take a while to get to the meat of the story and the conspiracy as Sean and Hazel did their will-they-won’t-they dance in a fake boyfriend/bodyguard ruse that felt somewhat amateurish for this high-octane story. If Hazel suffered from all the pining, Sean’s own indecision got rather aggravating until a near-fatal accident took it all out of him and got him to buckle down for the ride.

The big reveal and the unravelling of the conspiracy did seem kind of a let down after the elaborate setup however, when it all peaked and then wrapped in the last 15 or so pages of the long, long read where telling took over showing. Left with the niggling feeling that I’d been taken for a huge, circular joyride with political and human-experimentation inserts from time to time, I finished ‘Silent Evidence’ semi-content that Sean/Hazel rode off into their HEA but wondered if the story could have been shorter and tighter.