Consumed

by J.R. Ward

October 2, 2018 · Gallery Books

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Consumed by JR Ward is an angsty contemporary romance with lots of dark themes and a hint of romantic suspense. I really liked the heroine, but the hero never clicked with me, and I felt like there was too much going on with the plot at times.

Anne Ashburn is a New Brunswick firefighter who loves her job and carries a torch for her coworker, Danny McGuire. Anne and Danny had a mind-blowing one night stand that they both refuse to talk about although it’s clear they have feelings for each other. During a fire Anne is trapped and Danny nearly dies saving her. Anne loses her hand in the fire…

…thus ending her career as a fire fighter.

Anne gets a job as an arson investigator, but she misses her found family at the firehouse where she worked. Danny, still traumatized from the fire that nearly killed them both, pulls away from Anne.

This is where I struggled with the book the most. Danny and Anne both share the same trauma. They both have physical and psychological scars. While Anne is working to move forward in her life, Danny is stuck in the same place, letting survivor’s guilt keep him in a toxic rut of binge drinking, meaningless sex, and acting out at work. That means that Anne is stuck doing most, if not all, of the emotional labor.

She raised her prosthesis. “This happened to me because of my job. And I had to decide whether or not I was going to let random circumstance, in a risk pool I was well aware I was swimming in, ruin my life or not. I wasn’t a target. I wasn’t singled out. It was a danger I accepted, and I got hurt, and everyone who’s been injured or killed made the same calculation and just happened to come up short. I’m not saying you shouldn’t mourn the people we’ve both lost. What I’m telling you is… don’t let that fire we both went into willingly a year ago kill you by default. You made it out in fact, don’t give that blessing up.”

She waited for him to respond.

The longer he was silent, the sadder she became. “I don’t want this for either of us, Danny. And I am sorry, I am so…sorry…that I fucked up and you came to get me, and things went bad. I never wanted to put anyone in that position, but certainly not you.”

After a moment, he whispered, “Why am I different?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s because of what you’re doing to yourself right now. I knew this was how it would go in the aftermath.”

“Oh, so you think I’m a pussy,” he muttered. “Thanks.”

“The strong do not wallow. They don’t drink themselves into a stupor, they don’t fuck around at their work, they don’t throw punches at their friends. They move forward. You did what you had to do to me. What I told you to do to me. And instead of moving on from that you’re using it as an excuse to self-destruct.”

Here’s the thing: Danny sounds like a lot of work. He sounds like needs a lot of therapy and time to figure his shit out. 1. I tend to find this exhausting and 2. there’s not enough time in the book for me to believe he overcame all of this emotional constipation. He sort of has an ah-ha moment and heals, which I don’t think is very realistic given the extent of the trauma we’re talking about here. It’s entirely reasonable that both Anne and Danny would have PTSD from that fire, which isn’t something that goes away overnight. For the most part his character felt very immature to me, and I didn’t have the patience to wait for him to grow up.

Conversely, I liked Anne a lot. She never acts like a victim or allows her disability to define her. She misses her old job, but finds meaning in her new one. She makes accommodations that allow her to live her life more or less as she did before, like getting a prosthesis that allows her to still go rock climbing. She has moments of grief for the job she can’t do anymore and insecurity about how others will view her, but she never becomes a self-pitying dumpster fire like Danny does. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she adopts a pitbull mix she finds on the streets. The dog, named Soot, is learning to heal from a rough patch too, and their bond was sweet and wonderful.

I also liked the romantic suspense elements of this book, although they’re pretty much packed in at the end. Anne begins to suspect something is amiss with a series of warehouse fires which puts her in the crosshairs of a property magnate who might be a killer.

I love romantic suspense so this should have been all my catnip, but the suspense elements sort of pop up and disappear. The first part of the book is mostly setting the stage of Anne and Danny’s past and how she wound up starting over. When Anne starts to suspect that all these abandoned warehouse fires might be connected in some way, I was like “ah-ha! Here we go!” Except we really didn’t. We take huge breaks from Anne pursuing her arson case in order for her to pick Danny up off the floor, deal with her mom moving in, and reconnect awkwardly with her former firefighters. We go from scenes with a lot of tension (like Anne confronting a potential villain while wearing a wire) to Anne attending a barbecue she really doesn’t want to attend, and the tension just flip flops around.

I think if the book had focused on Anne and Danny healing and falling in love (or admitting to it) while Anne worked on her warehouse mystery, I would have enjoyed it more. In addition to all of that we also get a ton of firehouse drama (TW/CW: some of this includes drug abuse, PTSD and suicide) as well as Anne’s conflicted relationships with her mother and brother. There are too many subplots and not enough focus on the mystery at hand.

If you love angsty romance and you want a hero who needs a lot of help, then I think Consumed will work really well for you. It wasn’t quite the right mix for me, although I did love its heroine.