I was really excited when Hold Your Breath was released because it’s romantic suspense centered around a Rocky Mountain search and rescue team which is 100% my jam. The book was an interesting blend of suspense, action/adventure, and small town romance, and it’s very, very funny.

Louise “Lou” Sparks left behind her controlling family and unsatisfying job for a new life in rural Colorado. She’s a diver on the search and rescue team, meaning when someone falls through lake ice, she puts on a Gumby suit and pulls them out. She lives in a cabin that’s heated by a wood stove and powered by a solar generator. If you want to read a romance where the heroine is all about roughing it, then this is your book.

Lou is practicing cold water rescue with her team when she kicks something loose and a headless corpse floats up. Lou feels responsible for the man, who she nicknames HDG (headless dead guy), and starts looking into who he might be.

At the same time, a stalker appears to be menacing Lou. Her boss, Callum Cook, who is a stern, frowny-pants type of dude, is really worried for Lou and acts as her bodyguard. Callum is a big grouch who acts like he doesn’t have feels because he really REALLY likes Lou, but is really bad at communicating that fact. He’s pretty adorable. Lou is goofy and disorganized and very funny, and Callum is uptight and quiet and kind of disapproving but secretly amused, and they make a great pair as both detectives and potential lovers.

The book is also very funny. Take this scene, when the police show up because Lou’s stalker left honey smeared on her door:

“It fits better with the slashed tires MO.” Chris leaned in close to the door to examine the frozen rivulets. “It looks like honey.”

“It is honey,” Lou affirmed. “I tasted it.”

The deputy’s head whipped around. “Are you a toddler? Don’t be putting random shit in your mouth. Especially shit left by your stalker.”

With a sheepish shrug, Lou carefully didn’t look at Callum. “Fine. No more taste testing the evidence. It just seemed like the easiest way to identify it.”

“Nope. Bad idea. You can use all of your senses in an investigation except taste.”

So Lou and Callum work together to figure out who HDG is and who her stalker is and if they are related.

I think the thing that I struggled with the most was that they were running an amateur investigation right alongside the police who kinda know about it. One police officer is clearly inept and a jerk, but the others are fine. Still, I can’t see them being okay with two people from the search and rescue team trying to solve a murder. The fact that Lou and Callum make more headway than the cops also makes the cops seem pretty inept.

The other thing I didn’t like is that we didn’t get full resolution on HDG. His part of the mystery appears to be an arc that’s going to appear in the next books.

While the suspense and action were intense, I found the romance to be a little tame. Part of it was that we never get inside Callum’s head. The book is mostly 3rd person POV from Louise’s perspective. When you have a hero as taciturn and withdrawn as Callum, keeping his thoughts a mystery weakens the romance. Like the heroine, we have to guess at his feelings and desires, which reduces some of the sexual tension.

While Hold Your Breath isn’t perfect, it’s still a fast, funny read and a promising start to a new series.