Rage in the Page: SEALs Rock!

Friday, August 25, 2006

Title: Flashpoint
Author: Suzanne Brockmann

Hooray! More SEALs!

The computer nerd heroine, Tess, has always wanted to be an agent for some random agency she’s working for. She helps save Decker’s life when he’s undercover and ambushed by pretending to be a topless waitress at a strip club so she can warn him while his partner, Nash, kills people on the roof so the helicopter can land. Later that night, she brings Nash home with her. Then he disappears in Mexico for a few months. In the meantime, Decker joins the independent agency staffed by all sorts of former SEALs (like all the characters in the last book I talked about).

They need to do a mission in Kazbekistan, which just suffered a devastating earthquake, so Decker drags Nash off the beach, and unbeknownst to them, their boss brings in Tess to be their computer geek. Tess has to be Nash’s wife, since Decker already has an identity he uses in K-stan (I’m totally going to start using the abbreviations from the book), and the regime in charge there doesn’t so much go for women leaving their homes alone, let alone being unmarried and foreign.

There’s all sorts of tension, sexual and otherwise, between Nash and Tess as they travel to K-stan and live as a married couple. Meanwhile, as Decker’s wandering the city at night to track down a missing warlord, he comes across Sophia, an ex-pat who hasn’t had the easiest time the past few months, after her husband was beheaded and she was turned into a sex slave for the warlord’s friends. Decker captures her, but she escapes by giving him a blow job and running off while he’s incapacitated.

There is no government or infrastructure, and everything is a mess – buildings falling and randomly exploding, people being arrested for minor infractions – but the focus of the entire team is to succeed in their mission, finding ways to make things work.

Will they make it out of K-stan alive? Will Tess and Nash live happily ever after? I’m not telling. :-)

Labels: hunky armed forces or government operatives, romantic "suspense", trashy romance