STING

A rock-jawed bad guy and a sexy entrepreneur feel the mutual heat in Brown’s latest story of a damsel in distress and her tarnished knight.

Jordie Bennett is having a bad night. One minute, the gorgeous woman sits nursing a drink in a run-down Louisiana bar, and the next, she’s been kidnapped by a murderous hit man. The hit man in question, Shaw Kinnard, shoots his partner, fellow killer for hire Mickey Bolden, before Bolden has a chance to kill Jordie, then abducts her and drives around and finally holes up with her still a hostage. Her abduction isn’t random, though. Seems Jordie’s brother, Josh, worked for a famous criminal named Billy Panella. Panella is at the top of law enforcement’s fugitive list after he swindled millions out of their nest eggs, like a more modest Bernie Madoff. Now, Shaw’s in a race to find Josh—an escaped federal witness—before the FBI or Panella can beat him to it. And everyone, including FBI agents Wiley and Hickam, who are hot on Josh's trail, believes that his sister, Jordie, holds the key. Although Brown is an excellent and almost effortless writer, over the years her plots have devolved into paint-by-numbers efforts: a hunky, distant bad boy ends up in reluctant contact with a beautiful-beyond-belief woman in peril. The chemistry is undeniable, and much heat ensues. The woman struggles with the bad boy’s past while the bad boy struggles with his feelings for the beautiful lady. Readers won’t have to be prescient to figure out what happens in this typical entry into the Brown playbook because the outcome is as predictable as the humidity and mosquitoes that plague the Louisiana bayous in the summertime.

Brown moves her besieged female characters around to different locations but persists in employing the same tired trope over and over in books saved only by her smooth writing and savvy dialogue chops.