This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by LK. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romantic Suspense category.

Here is LK's review:

I was not familiar with the Fatal series or Marie Force going into this, but the description looked like it had a bunch of my personal catnip: ass-kicking lead woman, romantic thriller, political elements. (I love reading/watching totally off-the-rails versions of DC. Except House of Cards. Don’t get me started on how much I hate House of Cards.)

Anyway, the book opens in medias res, as it were, and it’s immediately obvious that some serious shit went down in the previous books. Lieutenant Sam Holland, our protagonist, was kidnapped and tortured only a few months earlier and has been placed on medical leave from the DC Metro Police Department (MPD) until she deals with her PTSD. Meanwhile, her new husband Nick is preparing to be sworn in as Vice President—or may have already been sworn in? It’s a little unclear, since everyone refers to him as the VP, not VP-elect, and he and Sam both already have office space in the White House. Either way, inauguration is coming up and someone is going on a stabbing spree across the city. Sam would normally be right there leading the investigation into the stabbings, but she’s unsure if she wants to return to work at all, especially since taking on a policy/advocacy role as Second Lady would be a natural out.

We eventually meet Sam’s friends and family, including her colleagues at MPD, who have obviously played major roles in prior stories. Their stories continue in this book as well. I was lost for a little while about who was who and what was happening, but eventually caught up with most of what was a very well-drawn world.

I really appreciated two things about Fatal Frenzy:

1. While almost every character’s backstory (or at least, their story over the first eight books) was eventually filled in, none of it felt like an exposition dump.
2. There was no attempt to gloss over how traumatic the previous events of the series had been for everyone.

While I understand the narrative reasons why this happens, it often subtly nags at me when the ending of a romantic suspense book is, “hey, Heroine, sorry all these horrible traumatic things happened to you, but now you have a Hero who loves you and that solves everything!” In Fatal Frenzy, Sam goes to therapy first because she’s ordered to, but eventually because she wants to, and it’s implied she’s gone before. We don’t get much from Nick, but we do get details on how Sam’s trauma has impacted him as well, though, happily, no big speech about how she should quit her job and stay home so he stops worrying about her. In fact, they establish right from the start that Sam and Nick agreed she would decline Secret Service protection (Google break: yes, this is a thing you can do unless you are the President or Vice President. Anyone else entitled to SS protection can decline it.) and he had a car tricked out for her with various safety features so she could still do her job if she wanted to.

Meanwhile, other characters go out of their way to respect how certain events could be triggering for their colleagues/friends/partners, and they react or plan ahead accordingly. While it didn’t make for the happiest of reads—and some parts of this book outright had me tearing up—it was refreshing to see the author tackle these less sexy topics.

This was a pretty heavy book, emotionally speaking, and Goodreads reviews indicate that is not the case for the rest of the series. It was consequently light on the “romance” aspect, although seeing partners support each other through the bad can be romantic in its own sense. I didn’t really buy the villain, but aside from one major traumatic incident, the bad guy was sort of beside the point here. It was all about the relationships between the characters.

The major downside, for me, of this book is that we did not get too much on Nick. Why is he VP? Why did the sitting president drop his old VP off the ticket and add Nick? What did Nick do to single-handedly win reelection for this unpopular president (as is stated without any real follow-up)? It’s entirely possible this only bothers me because I happen to know a lot about that world, so others may not pick up on that at all. It’s implied the next book in the series will focus more on Nick and some good old-fashioned political machinations, so I will definitely be keeping an eye out for that release!

Overall, I enjoyed it enough to want to go back and read some of the earlier books in the series.