This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Qualisign. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romantic Suspense category.
The summary:
Former Marine sniper Seth Harlan is determined to prove that he can still do his job despite his ongoing battle with PTSD. When an old friend contacts HORNET to rescue a black ops soldier, Seth’s stability is strained. He knows all too well what it’s like to rot inside an enemy camp, praying for rescue and waiting for death. And he’s not about to leave a man behind.
Photojournalist Phoebe Leighton just stumbled into the middle of an arms deal. Teaming up with a ragtag team of mercenaries is the last thing she wants to do–especially when she realizes Seth Harlan is assigned to the mission. He may ignite a passion in her she thought long dead, but Phoebe’s hiding a secret that could destroy him.
With a bomb in the mix, HORNET’s mission is suddenly about a lot more than an abandoned soldier. Racing against the clock, Seth, Phoebe, and the rest of the team struggle to stop a ruthless warlord bent on power, revenge…and death.
Here is Qualisign's review:
[Reviewer’s biases: This reviewer’s creds/quirks may help explain why I reacted so strongly to some elements in the book: Introvert. ADD. Previous panic disorder. Social and cultural anthropologist.]
The Cover
One must not judge this book by its cover because it is… Just. Plain. Wrong.
1) Our Hero, Seth, is recognized across a crowded marketplace by his blue eyes. Not grey, not white, not pale green; they were recognizably blue.
2) The Hero wore a hoodie to cover his many, many physical scars and to hide his emotional scars from casual perusal. While the cover model may have witnessed a food fight—from afar and with total distain—there is no evidence of his have survived a battle, much less extended torture. The wife-beater worn by the cover model is designed to show off the perfection of the model’s physique, which is enhanced by his flawless skin. There is no one in the book that looks like this guy.
3) Roiling red sky and bare sand hills as a background. Really? The action begins in the Everglades, moves to a Middle Eastern marketplace located in the center of a city, and finally through a bit of countryside (not desert) to a compound previously used by the US military and what we get is this bit of barren background.
While I don’t always judge a book by its cover, having seen the cover prior to reading the book, I kept worrying that I was reading the wrong novel. It didn’t help that each of the teaser blurbs I read was also misleading.
The Book
The good: The writing style, especially descriptions of locations, of people, and of actions, which may be why I found the cover so deeply unsatisfactory. I liked Burrow’s narrative line and, for the most part, the way she dealt with violence, which did not—again, for the most part—sugar coat the atrocities perpetrated by those on all sides. Almost all of the characters, good, bad or otherwise, even those only briefly on stage, had individual personalities. In a book and series that deals with a Blackwater/Xe/Academi type security group functioning as black-ops with government deniability, it would be very easy to turn either the good guys or the bad guys [sadly, the assumed gendering fits] immediately into single-dimension caricatures. While Burrows slipped on occasion into cartoon country, she typically followed the slip with some sort of twist to reestablish the characters’ agency, intelligence, or individuality.
Also good: The Hero. Well written. Believable. The torture he endured wasn’t pretty either during the acts portrayed or in the aftermath. His scars were not decorative, and they extended well beyond typical written boundaries. Panic attacks were realistic. Nightmares believable. Self-doubt expected. Desire to become at least minimally functional was clear. Being dumped by his fiancé and only love(r) and because she thought him dead during his year of torture and fell in love with another in the meantime—was a bit heavy handed, but it was necessary/appropriate for the storyline.
The not-so-good: There are just too many characters! Our Hero, Seth, is highly damaged, dealing with PTSD, doesn’t want to be seen, doesn’t like people, doesn’t want to interact with people. He was maligned in the national (international?) press, and even before that, appears to have been an introvert. So why has he put himself in a situation where he is forced to hang out with so many people? Is it true that the only thing he can do is shoot a gun? Why hasn’t he tried other avenues of work? Ok. So maybe the answer is, “this is all he has.” I will say, if it had been me, there would be no way that I’d want join that group, with an emphasis on group, of seven or eight military dropouts (or cut offs, or whatever). To get a flavor of the gang, there is an interchange near the end of chapter 8 when the group’s medical guy was asked:
“Something wrong?”
“No,” he muttered. They only had a boss with a bum foot, a second-in-command with a traumatic brain injury, and a sniper with severe PTSD. “Nothing wrong at all.”
Hmmm. So this is where the reviewer’s ADD, coupled with introversion, comes into play. This is the second book in Burrow’s “Hornet Series.” I have not read book one, although it is clear that it ended with the first-in-command’s marriage to a previously single-parenting artist and with the second-in-command, Traumatic-Brain-Injury guy, involved in an unrequited love affair causing him to yell out his true love’s name on a semi-regular basis, rather like Marlon Brando’s anguished cry, “Stella.”
The multitudes of secondary characters were obviously included in anticipation of their own books. I’m afraid that I was peopled out in this book; I won’t be continuing the series, not even to find out whether or not the mean bully of teammate who adopted the abandoned dog will find his own human Fido and live happily ever after. (Though it is a bit tempting…) It was just too busy with people. After a while, I felt like the well-disguised info dumps were the narrative equivalent of the scene in Matrix where Neo and Trinity chose their weapons, but without the lovely sorting mechanism of the Matrix stockroom. There was just too much to sort through. I lost focus. My bad.
The bad: The heroine. Sorry. This is where my decades as a fieldworker and professor of anthropology come into play. Rather than be all spoilery (refraining for once!), I will only address my main complaint about her role in the book: she was a naïve do-gooder who never comprehended how much danger her very presence represented to everyone with whom she came into contact.
Did she actually have a good heart? Well, she apparently felt guilty enough about the person she was earlier to change her name and become a photojournalist, but not guilty enough to own up to her complicity in hurting others in her earlier career. Did she recognize that she put everyone in peril the moment she talked with them? Nope. Did she change through the book? Nope. Not really. Watching her very self-centered interactions with those of other cultures, my assessment was that she was a total cross-cultural catastrophe. Put her back in the USA, and she would probably be okay, but the unrecognized arrogance that she displayed with her picture snapping and expectations of how important she was to the (“her”?) cause just made me cranky.
The best female character in the book was the 16-year old woman whose escape from being an unwilling suicide bomber precipitated the mission that sent the Hero back to Afghanistan. While this young woman was described as a child bride, she was the least self-centered, and indeed most well-centered, woman in the entire book. Her maturity and concern for others was wonderful. I’d read another book in the series if she were the one with the HEA. I just wish that the Heroine had half her integrity.
The romance: Despite the lack of apparent personal growth in the Heroine and the deep brokenness of the Hero, the romance worked for me. It was central to the plot and was the centerpiece of the Hero’s healing and Heroine’s potential reclamation. In fact, it was the sweetness of the interactions between the two of them that held the book together. I felt that the Heroine’s “secret” was overkill in attempt to build obstacles for the romance. The fact is, the romance worked despite all the other external and internal issues bombarding the two. Except for the inclusion of that unnecessary device—the Heroine’s “secret”—the romance fit beautifully in the storyline.
Summary: Yes, Honor Reclaimed was worth reading, but I couldn’t get through it a second time, something I usually do when reviewing a book. I got all twitchy with the hordes of characters and just couldn’t go through it twice. For someone else, Honor Reclaimed would have been a great read. For me, it was okay, even after taking into account all my mini-rants along the way.
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This is a good place to say how much I enjoy reading two reviews of each of the various nominees.
With this title, my enjoyment is especially strong, because each reviewer’s own experience and background enhanced their thoughtful and interesting review.