Third in the series about an FBI agent and her K-9 partner, I wouldn’t recommend starting with Storm Rising if you haven’t read the other two. On the other hand, if you have read the other two, the first couple of chapters of this one are going to come across as pure infodump of stuff you already know, which may annoy you.
After the first couple of chapters is when stuff starts to get interesting, though I have to say the plot still takes too long to get going. Driscoll spends too much time setting up her protagonist getting into the situation to uncover a human trafficking ring, and there aren’t too many points where Meg herself is in any peril (apart from a rather bizarre scene with an alligator) which makes it hard for the reader to really feel any suspense in the story.
There were parts of the story I really enjoyed, and it’s obvious the author really knows her stuff when it comes to both disaster management scenarios and K-9 handling. Unfortunately, the book overall kind of falls in between two genres while not fitting into either; there’s not enough romance for it to be a romantic suspense, and there’s not enough ‘thrill’ for it to be a thriller. Meg doesn’t seem to be personally engaged in any way apart from her righteous outrage as a law enforcement officer investigating a heinous crime, in fact she actively tries to get out of being involved and is basically pressured into it by a senior officer.
This is a hard one to rate because it had good parts and yet there were a fair few issues; at the end of the day I’d probably read other books by this author but I’d hope for them to be better than this one. Three stars.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review through NetGalley.