I read the first two books in this trilogy years ago but this one languished in my TBR, and now that I've read it I remember why. The suspense plot isn't bad and the characters are basically likeable, but their love lives are melodramatic to the point of being OTT. One character can't love, because he had a hard childhood. That's reasonable. The idea that he had run away from home at 10 and lived on his own ever since was less believable. The character who felt like he wasn't good enough for his true love had not one big secret, but two.

The characters were also incredibly unprofessional. Answering personal phone calls in the middle of raids and telling national security secrets to ex-lovers is par for the course with these characters and it all got very eye-roll inducing. That was especially problematic because we're meant to believe that STORM Corps. is the greatest mercenary firm in the world, and that it's good that the government uses them to go around the law.

Overall the book wasn't bad, but I would have enjoyed it more if the whole thing had been dialed down just a bit. ( )

If you’re running a competition to find the most embarrassing book cover ever, look no further. Here’s your winner. The designer obviously worked on the theory women only like pink and biceps. My problem is that pink is a little on the embarrassing side, and biceps have their uses, but put together on a cover = a book you can never let anybody see you with.

I liked the conclusion to the ‘Passion For Danger’ trilogy, but if you haven’t read the earlier books you’re not going to appreciate it anywhere near as much. Yet again the hero and heroine take a definite backseat to EVERYONE else. Though Gregg and Gina’s story has been running through the whole trilogy, and so I felt a little more connected to them than the stars of the last book, their story wasn’t given justice in this one. One minute Gregg is a crazy, dangerous agent guy who may or may not have sold Gina to terrorists and who can only get turned on when he’s tied Gina to the bed. The next he’s telling some story about childhood trauma, being tied to the bed himself, and getting mushy at a wedding and proposing with a whole lot of purple prose. It’s hard to believe in such an extreme character transformation when it happens off the page.

The premise is interesting; Gina was kidnapped by terrorists in the first book, tortured and forced to work for them in the second, and here at the beginning of the third is just recovering after her rescue. Gregg was the man who took her to the place where she was abducted from, so when the book begins she believes that not only is he a traitor, but that he’s coming back for her. Of course, Gregg isn’t the bad guy here.

What we got of the relationship was good. Gregg is an interesting hero (and blonde! – I’m so sick of people who’ll only read about heroes who are carbon copies of each other, but who are fine with women being eight feet tall, 600 pounds, with multi-coloured hair and a pet pig), and there was a lot of potential there. It’s only a pity the author forgot he was the hero, and gave more page time to Alex (also blonde!). Same goes for Gina. There was so much potential for a heroine who is recovering from a terrible ordeal while believing the man she’s in love with in working with terrorists. But Rebel stole her book from her.

Yet again I liked the characters – the eighty-six thousand and two characters – and their stories. But I didn’t like them all in the same book. Rebel and Alex’s relationship took over the book, which would have almost been fine if Rebel wasn’t a prim and proper ‘Southern Belle’ little…FBI agent…who spent more time nagging all the men about bad language than actually doing any work. Speaking of the bad language, the woman’s offended by words I didn’t even know could be offensive. There were times she was nagging someone about swearing where I had to go back and read the dialogue a number of times because there wasn’t a swear word anywhere to be seen.

Marc – hero of the last book – obviously wasn’t a favourite of the author’s, as I think he might have had about a paragraph of page time and maybe two words to say in the whole book. Maybe if the author hadn’t given the female characters so many Too Stupid To Live moments there might have been more time for Marc to flex those superhero muscles. TSTL in order to move the plot along is always annoying. Rebel being on the phone, gossiping with her friend through the terrorist attack at the beginning and the assassination attempt at the end was stupid. There are moments for the characters to deal with friendships and relationships, and then there are moments where they should be doing their job!

There was so much happening that when we got to the best part of the story it was dealt with too quickly. By then we’d spent so much time with so many people that there wasn’t page space to make the action at the end very exciting. When that was over and done with we got a few pages of super-gooey, lovey-dovey stuff with a wedding, a baby and a proposal. I don’t think that in a series about Islamic extremists, CIA agents and torture we need to be handed the standard, old-fashioned ‘your life’s not complete until you’ve had the white wedding and popped out the kiddies’ ending. That’s what the category romances are for. Don’t make something edgy and then borrow the Virgin Princess and the Billionaire Tycoon’s epilogue. It's wrong.

This series had so much potential, but became swamped in too many characters and too many side stories that none of them were given justice. I would have liked for there to have been six books instead of three so that we could actually get to know these people and care about their relationships. There were certainly enough couples to fill out a longer series. It also would have been nice if the books were a little more self-contained; none of them stand up on their own, and so you have to read them in quick succession to have any hope of understanding them.
There’s a lot of good here, but the Passion For Danger series is not my favourite romantic suspense by a long shot. ( )

Not great literature. But an easy, fun quick and mindless read. I did skim some parts. ( )