SOUNDS LIKE TROUBLE

In this follow-up to Sounds Like a Plan (2024), the author duo’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith–like characters are still flirting, still fighting, and somehow managing to get things done.

Dueling private investigators Mackenzie Cunningham and Jackson Jones, rivals in last year’s novel, merge their businesses and set up a new detective agency in Los Angeles in this light and humorous second in a series. The straitlaced Mackenzie and the diva-esque Jackson are like oil and water, but it’s their differences and their squabbles that make them irresistible characters. Despite the fact they want to work together, they can’t even agree on how to decorate their new office. When the heads of three crime families want to hire them to find documents that threaten their powerful enterprises, Mackenzie and Jackson see it as a job—and a hefty paycheck—they can’t refuse. Their task is to locate the damaging information before its owner, in a coma in the hospital, dies. If he does, the information will be released by his attorney and the mob bosses will go down. Gun fights, car chases, break-ins, and explosions give the novel its edge. The lively, jousting banter between the main characters is funny and sexy, all the more so because the chapters are alternately written from Mackenzie’s and Jackson’s points of view. Authors Young and Smith ably captures the yin and yang of Mackenzie’s and Jackson’s personalities. This novel, like its predecessor, may be predictable and a little bit silly, but its strength lies in its winning characters who have agreed to keep romance out of their working lives, but readers can’t help wondering how long that will last.

The novel’s “will-they, won’t-they” vibe ramps up the tension in this lighthearted thriller.