YAY!! Reviews for January IN January!! A momentous occasion! While Active Defense wasn’t the first book I read in January, it was a book that I received from the publisher so I wanted to get this review written before I delved into the rest of this month’s books.
Third in Eason’s Danger Never Sleeps series, this story focuses on Heather and was probably my favorite of the series so far. All of these books are centered on a group of friends who met/served together in the military in Afghanistan, but I appreciate the fact that Eason doesn’t try to politicize her stories. Most of the action takes place stateside, but Eason uses the military and Afghanistan as a backdrop that is effective and engaging.
Heather worked as a field surgeon when she was in Afghanistan, and is now back home in South Carolina as a civilian, working in a hospital there. However, she’s recently become convinced that someone is following her – and she can’t figure out why. She confesses her concern to her friends one night when they’ve gathered for a cookout. Present are several characters from the last two books, including Travis, who owns a security agency and employs a couple of the other characters. That night, when Heather gets home, she notices several things out of place at her house and even though her alarm hasn’t been triggered, believes someone is hiding in her house. When she sees a picture of her and her closest friends on the refrigerator, each of them now sporting a red dot on their foreheads that weren’t there earlier, she grabs her emergency cash and emergency gun and bails, only letting her friends know that she’s going into hiding and that they may be in danger, not telling them where she’s headed.
The action in this one felt well-paced and (for the situation) believable. Now that more relationships have been established within the group of friends, the story was more cohesive than the earlier books – originally the readers were just told that these people all trusted one another, but now we’ve seen them working together and have watched that trust develop.
Sometimes the “side story” feels extraneous and distracting, but here I liked the addition of Ryker’s story. His background with an abusive father tied in well to Heather’s background, giving her more depth and helping us to better understand some of her actions, while also showing how situations where someone is being abused are frequently nuanced – not because the abuse is ever justified, but because it can be so difficult for victims to extract themselves from these horrible situations.
All in all, this was an enjoyable read – what I would call “lite” thriller – definitely a thriller, but not necessarily with the dark intensity that that term generally conjures up. While this reads best within the context of the earlier two books, it still stands independently and can be read that way, although you’ll miss some of the background connections between other characters. I’ve liked Heather from the beginning of the series and was glad to see her get her own story. Also, while I originally thought this was going to be a trilogy (mainly because Eason seems to favor them) but it appears that a fourth book is scheduled to be published this year.
Conclusion – 4* for an engaging and enjoyable read. Special thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy, which didn’t impact my opinions at all.
The Aroma of Books 