Really good first half, ordinary second half. Romantic suspense with a pleasant ending.

STORY BRIEF:
Caitlin’s parents are killed in an auto accident when she was a baby. She is adopted by the Montgomerys who are told she was abandoned at the door of a church. Her siblings are sent to foster families. The Montgomerys name her Kate. 22 years later Kate is a TV news reporter. She knows she is adopted but doesn’t know anything about her parents or siblings. Someone is stalking her and tries to hit Kate with a car. Teague has a private security company. He stays with Kate as a bodyguard due to the stalker. Although Senator Oberlin is married, he is intensely attracted to Kate.

REVIEWER’S OPINION:
I really liked the first half, but the second half seemed a little more ordinary to me. I didn’t want to stop reading it. I enjoyed the development of the relationship between Kate and Teague, but I did not like the methods used to create conflict between them, described in spoilers below. It was still a good book, but it could have been better.

DATA:
Story length: 396 pages. Swearing language: moderate. Sexual language: moderate. Number of sex scenes: 2. Total number of sex scene pages: 17. Setting: current day Austin, Texas. Copyright: 2005. Genre: romantic suspense.

OTHER BOOKS:
To date, I’ve read one other book by Christina Dodd. My 4 star review for “Danger in a Red Dress” copyright 2009 was posted 3/8/09.


CAUTION SPOILERS:

I was disappointed with the following.

Pages 102 and 105: A man attacks, and Teague fights him. At the end of the fight, Kate sees a stark, soulless look in Teague’s eyes. Kate and Teague had been drawn to each other previously, but after she saw the look in his eyes, she backs away, is wary and won’t touch him. I didn’t buy it. He just fought a bad guy. He shouldn’t have a warm, fuzzy look in his eyes.

Page 180: Kate and Teague are in lust with each other and are on their way to have sex for the first time. They are interrupted by something. During the interruption, Teague decides that they should not have a relationship because she will be happier without him, and he leaves her. Then he avoids her for 3 weeks. This combines two of my pet peeves: denying one’s attraction for someone and inaccurate assumptions.

Pages 315 and 318: Teague is worried about Kate’s safety and asks her boss to assign her to safer assignments for a couple of days. Kate is mad at Teague when she hears this. She had agreed to call him every four hours for security reasons. But because she is mad at him, she doesn’t call him, and she turns her cell phone off. She is driving to a dangerous place, the bad guy is on his way to that place, she doesn’t tell people providing security where she is going, and she cuts off their ability to communicate with her. I hate it when the heroine does something stupid merely for the sake of the plot. Come on dear author, you can do better than this, just give it a little more thought. You did such a good job on the first half.

When Kate’s mother sees a famous person on TV, she realizes that he was the mystery person who gave her the baby to adopt. Why didn’t she see his face earlier? She’s lived in Texas for awhile, and he is a well publicized politician in her area.