Janus Publishing – Unstuck Pages

Publisher: Janus Publishing

Unstuck Pages > Janus Publishing

Winter Hawk by Rachel Grant

Posted on 6th January 20205th December 2019 by Dísir

Winter Hawk: A Raptor Holiday Novella by Rachel Grant
Series: Evidence, #9
Published by Janus Publishing on 6th December 2019
Pages: 200
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
two-stars

Raptor operative Nate Sifuentes isn’t thrilled to find himself back on the job on the first day of his winter vacation, but he can’t say no when his brother asks a favor. At least he’ll earn an easy Christmas bonus—after all, driving a fired military contractor home after she’s been escorted off base by military police can’t be that hard.

In a matter of minutes, Leah Ellis has lost everything, and now she’s left stranded in the nation’s capital on the first night of Hanukkah without money, phone, or bed. All she has is a mysterious driver who might be after her technical knowledge of the US military’s drone operations.

The former Green Beret’s protective instincts—and skills—kick in when he discovers the alluring AI engineer is being hunted. On the run, they escape the winter cold by generating their own heat, but will they find answers in time to stop a terror attack on Christmas Day?

Nate Sifuentes is the marginalised Raptor operative sent to pick up fired employee and drone engineer Leah Ellis, in what looks like a simple assignment until it blows up in their faces. That in essence, is ‘Winter Hawk’ , a short holiday novella in Rachel Grant’s Evidence series that is classic romantic suspense—non-stop action, tension, a conspiracy to unravel, with hot boinks in the midst of escaping the bad guys while clearing one’s good name. Think Bond or Bourne, just more compressed, with breathier scenes.

What feels like secondary characters become the protagonists here—older, jaded, done anything and everything with a ton of sexual partners—though the suspense is in no way compromised just because both Nate Sifuentes/Leah Ellis hadn’t been at the forefront of Grant’s books.

But I thought the brevity of the novella however did the pairing little justice given the speed at which everything went down. There’s the meet and greet to the sex (with a near-stranger) that felt more like a one-nighter than a start to a meaningful relationship and then the resolution, all of which didn’t erase the instalove feel I got from this—more so because it felt adrenaline-fuelled rather than genuine chemistry, heartfelt connection and mutual dependence. At the end of it all, I didn’t get or like this pairing, nor could I properly get invested in them at all, seeing as much of this couple was literally ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am/sir’ and then it was the happy ride into the sunset along with a few out-of-place TSTL moments at the start.

Oddly enough, I think I might have enjoyed this more without the romance as a result, since this felt like the only questionable element in the story that proved a little too distracting. So not quite a disappointment, but also not the stellar read that I’ve come to associated with Grant’s kind of calibre.

Silent Evidence by Rachel Grant

Posted on 10th January 20191st January 2019 by Dísir

Silent Evidence by Rachel Grant
Series: Evidence,
Published by Janus Publishing on 28th December 2018
Pages: 436
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
four-stars

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.

Firestorm by Rachel Grant

Posted on 15th July 201813th July 2018 by Dísir

Firestorm by Rachel Grant
Series: Flashpoint #3
Published by Janus Publishing on 10th July 2018
Pages: 300
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

CIA covert operator Savannah James is after intel on a potential coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but she needs a partner fluent in Lingala to infiltrate the organization. Sergeant First Class Cassius Callahan is the perfect choice, except he doesn’t like her very much. He doesn’t trust her, either, despite the sparks that flare between them, fierce and hot. Still, he accepts the assignment even though their cover requires Savvy to pose as his mistress.

They enter battle-worn Congo to expose the financing for the coup. A trail of cobalt, gold, and diamonds leads them into the heart of a jungle in which everyone is desperate to find the mother lode of ore and gems. Betrayal stalks them as they follow the money, but Savvy will stop at nothing to bring down the would-be dictator before he can ignite a firestorm that will engulf all of Africa.

Deep in the sultry rainforest, spy and Green Beret forge a relationship more precious than diamonds, but Cal knows Savvy is willing to sacrifice anything—or anyone—to complete her mission. As they near the flashpoint, Cal will have to save her from the greatest threat of all: herself.

Start a Rachel Grant book and it’s a sure-thing to surface only a few days later. It’s that intricate, that complex and that impossible to breeze through because of the details and the twists and turns that slowly come into play despite the deceptively simple beginning. A light-hearted read this isn’t, but ‘Firestorm’, like every other Grant read, always muscles in on the romantic suspense genre with a lot of audacious aplomb.

That kind of daring comes in from the beginning with Savannah James and Cassius Callahan going undercover, though the trajectory of the storytelling doesn’t stay in a direction you’d expect. There’re hooked roads, forked paths and unforeseen obstacles that constantly throw wrenches in the good ol’ plot, which makes ‘Firestorm’ and all-round absorbing ride. But beneath that, there are also gut-churning and tooth-rottingly salacious details revolving around exploitative sex, violence and mega-money deals in a hot zone in Africa—all of which Cal and Savvy try to uncover without compromising themselves—that can be difficult to power through.

Still, betrayals and disavowals are par for the course, and it’s akin to hopscotching blindfolded in a minefield. The lack of full disclosure, the deception and lies (whether necessary or not), tend to be one of my pet-peeves in such romances nonetheless. ‘The mission above all’ as mantra and the prolonged double-crossing that inevitably destroys a relationship account for what I’ve always thought of as the biggest failings in such stories. There are a few instances of that here, unsurprisingly as it is, when it comes down to spooks justifying their belief that the ends justify the means. That said, it makes for interesting, though not always enjoyable friction and conflict between Cal and Savvy.

In contrast to Cal’s open-book demeanour however, I was itching to unravel Savannah, or at least get to the real person behind the mission-above-all heartless character who’s seemingly been nothing more than a compassionless automaton in the first few books of this series. What I wasn’t prepared for was a tragic backstory to emerge, and one that should be uncomfortably close to women who’ve tried to rise in their careers. It isn’t to say there aren’t eye-rolling TSTL moments—like the stunt she pulls towards the end, which made me think that trust was still an issue, not to mention the stupid (and wrong) belief of doing even stupider things to in a self-sacrificing way that typically gets old and annoying.

As I’d initially expected, ‘Firestorm’ is a longer read than most typical romance-length books. Beyond the characters and the thrilling storyline, Grant takes her time laying out the context of the Central African region to the point where parts of the story feel like a anthropological documentary embedded into the rush of adventure…and for that alone, it’s not hard to consider ‘Firestorm’ a fantastic (and quite possibly, the best) addition to the series.

Catalyst by Rachel Grant

Posted on 24th October 2017 by Dísir

Catalyst by Rachel Grant
Series: Flashpoint #2
Published by Janus Publishing on November 21st 2017
Pages: 350
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
three-stars

When a food storage depot in famine-struck South Sudan is torched, American aid worker Brie Stewart flees, only to land in a market where she’s the next item up for auction. Is the attack on the aid facility another assault upon the war-torn fledgling democracy, or has her family set her up as a pawn in their quest for oil rights?

Chief Warrant Officer Sebastian Ford crossed paths with Brie years ago when she was a shill for her family’s company, pushing a pipeline that threatened his tribe’s land. Determined to lead the rescue operation to save her, he won’t let her abduction—or the attraction that flares between them—get in the way of settling their unfinished business.

The Green Beret’s skills are put to the test in the flooded grasslands of South Sudan, where they must battle nature and dangerous factions who are after more than oil. Bastian and Brie put their hearts on the line as they find themselves embroiled in a conflict that extends beyond country and continent. Together they must douse the spark before it reaches the flashpoint and engulfs everything they hold dear.

I’ve always thought of Rachel Grant as the romantic suspense author who goes where good authors of this sub-genre go, then where most books actually end, takes it a breath-stealing mile further. Where entire books would have been written around a sex-trafficking plot, Grant integrates hers with a smartly-written overview of cultural anthropology, native American issues and the knife-edge balance of the socio-political situation in Africa that makes her Flashpoint series beyond excellent.

‘Catalyst’ is written pretty much in the same vein as its predecessor: thrilling, engaging and entirely absorbing, particularly if you love the kind of geopolitical background (with some corporate dirt thrown in) that Grant painstakingly unravels—which I do—in a part of the world that’s hardly written about in such books. For that alone, I can’t wax lyrical enough about this series, which is akin to seeing a complex chess-piece that’s put together in a narrative arc that makes it feel as though there’s yet unfinished business to conclude.

It’s also almost a given that her characters are equally multifaceted, and it’s my own fault that I didn’t quite warm to Brie and Bastian at all, with the former being more manipulatively needy and self-pitying because of her past than I expected, while the latter was too careless with people and unashamedly being Bastian the bastard about it. The games they later played with each other because neither of them could get a handle on commitment also didn’t help my ability to like Brie/Bastian as a pairing while as Brie’s ‘rich girl’s woe-is-me penance’ got tiring after a while. That said, the first half of ‘Catalyst’ enthralled me more than the second, where I found I needed to suspend disbelief a bit more when it seemed that many of the mysterious threads laid out so intricately in the first half were actually tied together by an obsessive man in Brie’s past.

The action and suspense are nonetheless very well-done and I was especially taken by the hostile tension between Savannah James and Cal whose book I hope Grant tackles next, as much as I loved the appearance of one of Grant’s best heroes in the Evidence series here.

Tinderbox by Rachel Grant

Posted on 2nd March 20171st March 2017 by Dísir

Tinderbox by Rachel Grant
Series: Flashpoint, #1
Published by Janus Publishing on February 14th 2017
Pages: 302
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
four-stars

In the volatile tinderbox of the Horn of Africa, Morgan Adler has made the paleoanthropological find of a lifetime. The discovery brings her to the attention of a warlord eager to claim both Morgan and the fossils, forcing her to make a desperate dash to the nearby US military base to beg for protection.
Master Sergeant Pax Blanchard has orders to intercept Dr. Adler before she reaches the base, and in so doing saves her life. After a harrowing afternoon he safely delivers her to his commanders, only to find his responsibilities toward protecting the obstinate archaeologist have only just begun.
Morgan and Pax are forced to work together in the Djiboutian desert heat, but it is the fire that ignites between them that threatens to combust them both. For the Green Beret, involvement with the woman he must protect is a threat to his career, while for the archaeologist, the soldier is everything she never wanted but somehow can’t resist. When Morgan uncovers a mystery surrounding Djibouti’s most scarce and vital resource, the danger to her reaches the flashpoint. For Pax, protecting her is no longer a matter of following orders, and he’ll risk everything to bring her back alive.

Rachel Grant’s stories—academically-inclined with scorching hot romance and suspense— simply satisfy the geek lurking in me, to be honest. The talk of paleoanthropology, archaeology and every geek thing out there gets my juices going and ‘Tinderbox’ made me lap it all up, wide-eyed. All of it. Including the detailed explanations of the volatile geopolitics of the Horn of Africa and the warring interests of the US, China and the surrounding African states that came through the characters’ dialogues. Grant’s intelligent writing is just that riveting really, with compelling characters and even smarter villains whose endgames aren’t revealed until after a series of twists and turns that will get any romantic suspense fan enthralled.

In fact, I’d call it fictional-realism for the blend that we get of Grant’s own archaeological experiences and her fantastic storytelling.

‘Tinderbox’ starts like any summer blockbuster movie: we are thrust straight into explosive action, characters at odds with each other and a location where few people would venture voluntarily. From there onwards, it’s a journey of mind-bending turns and slow cranks of the screw as the tension rackets up both in the region and for both Pax Blanchard and Morgan Adler. Perhaps the better question would be: how large would the blast radius be when it all finally ignites? And at the centre of it all, are Grant’s protagonists whose push-pull relationship finally reaches a point where some kind of stand needs to be made because the kind of circumstances they face simply don’t allow for anything else.

I did like Pax and the quiet competence that he showed, though it was harder to take to Morgan. So competent academically and physically, yet like a rebellious, immature teenager when it comes to mastering her own emotions and daddy-issues, she came across at times too much as a pushy, petulant teen than a knowledgeable PhD holder who should have known better than to bait Pax for sex (her lowest point for me) simply because her pride had taken a hit when she couldn’t accept Pax’s reasons for not wanting to pursue their relationship.

Fighting hard for women’s equality to be in a man’s world has been a recurring theme in Grant’s books and I do think it’s something that definitely resonates with me, though not if it results in a female lead sacrificing good sense and maturity in the process which I felt Morgan had done. Yet there’s no denying how much of a badass she could be when it all culminated in a thrilling and drawn-out action-packed climax that kept me turning the pages.

My own personal bias states that Grant isn’t an author to be passed up. ‘Tinderbox’ merely confirms this.

Poison Evidence by Rachel Grant

Posted on 30th October 2016 by Dísir

Poison Evidence by Rachel Grant
Series: Evidence #7
Published by Janus Publishing on October 25th 2016
Pages: 300
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
five-stars

After creating advanced mapping technology that intelligence agencies itch to add to their arsenals, Ivy MacLeod can’t turn down the perfect opportunity to test it: mapping a vast World War II battle site in the islands of Palau. The historic survey is more than an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise, it’s also an opportunity to distance her reputation from her traitorous ex-husband.

Disaster strikes when her ex-husband’s allies attempt to steal the equipment, but the man she turns to for help might be the bigger threat to her mission, her country, and her every waking thought. Is he protecting her as he claims...or is he a foreign agent? Her compass is skewed by the magnetic pull of him and further thrown off when she learns her own government has betrayed her.

Stranded on a tropical island with a man whose motives remain a mystery, Ivy must decide who is the spy, who is the protector, and who is the ultimate villain. Choose right, and she gets to keep her country’s secrets—and her life. Choose wrong...and she risks nothing short of all-out war.

A postcard from Palau arrives at Luke Sevick’s home – a plea for help. But the man who has sent it has his own identity buried so deep that we don’t know who he is until partway through the book, when he finally reveals it to Ivy Macleod, the woman whose equipment and help he needs to finish his endgame.

Of all of Rachel Grant’s leading men, I think none have captured my imagination as much as Parker Reeves/Jack Keaton/Dimitri Veselov, the man with many faces, identities and a past that has been a noose around his neck. Played by everyone, betrayed by those he loved, I fell hook, line and sinker for his story the moment he appeared in ‘Cold Evidence’ and devoured every breathless moment as Ivy threw his well-laid plans into disarray and him into a tailspin as they both gave each other as good as they got.

Grant doesn’t disappoint with a complex web of intrigue, shadow ops and a huge dose of romance that in no way compromises the breakneck pace of the suspense and the tightly-woven plot that twists and turns—and keeps ahead of the reader always. Brilliantly written and so intricately done, ‘Poison Evidence’ is such a stellar example of the genre that few books live up to.

Cold Evidence by Rachel Grant

Posted on 3rd February 20162nd June 2016 by Dísir

Cold Evidence by Rachel Grant
Series: Evidence, #6
Published by Janus Publishing on February 2nd 2016
Pages: 300
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
four-stars

The frigid waters of the Pacific Northwest are about to get hot…

The only thing Navy underwater archaeologist Undine Gray fears more than facing former SEAL Luke Sevick is never scuba diving again. But when a dive on a Cold War-era US Navy submarine ends with an accidental explosion, she’s terrified of going into the deep, forcing her to beg the most experienced diver she knows to take her back to the bottom of the cold Salish Sea.
Luke wants nothing to do with the woman who destroyed his career a dozen years ago but finds it impossible to turn his back on her plea. Caught off-guard by an attraction he doesn’t want to feel, he’s eager to be done with this mission of mercy. But when they dive on the wreck, he only gets sucked in deeper. Someone has been digging on the Navy sub…and it appears the explosion that almost killed Undine was no accident.
To find the truth, Undine must navigate murky waters and the unexpectedly hot undercurrents swirling between her and Luke. Worse, divers are searching for something lost in US waters during the Cold War, and they’ll do anything to keep Luke and Undine from finding it first.

An explosion on a technical dive brings Undine Gray back into Luke Sevick’s life, which is a turn of events he could never have conceived. Nor is it a welcome one, considering how Undine had thoroughly screwed his life up 12 years ago. But what starts as a normal deep dive on a Cold-War-era submarine soon becomes a matter of national security, ultimately forcing Undine and Luke to work out old hurts and grievances neither could have thought the years could erase.

Meticulously researched and intricately presented, ‘Cold Evidence’ provided more than a day’s worth of entertainment. Rachel Grant doesn’t skimp on the details or the action (or even the steamy scenes); the result of which is a satisfying, drawn-out read that also unravels the depth of her characters and their motivations.