Book Review - Where Danger Hides by Terry Odell

 Since I didn't post my usual book review yesterday, here is another one from Carl Brookins. Keep 'em coming Carl. And here's a link to Daily Cheap Reads where a number of authors have books mentioned that are on sale for only 99cents. One Small Victory is one of the books on sale until the end of May.
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Where Danger Hides
By Terry Odell
ISBN 978-1-43282-512-6
Five Star Mystery from Gale
May, 2011

The novel is a suspenseful thriller with a healthy dose of romance.  Or maybe it’s a romantic thriller with a good deal of suspense that keeps this moving at a sometimes alarming pace.  “Where Danger Hides” is both, and it’s also a fantasy in particular in the way and the speed with which the two principal characters are drawn together.

Miri Chambers is the caretaker and overseerer of a San Francisco shelter primarily for abused women.  Galoway House also manages to shelter and care for a number of children and men, as well. There’s a lot more to Miri Chambers. She is adept at disguise, light-fingered and as prickly as one can get. Two wrong words and she is liable to go off like a rocket. That propensity for shoot-from-the-hip judgments and attitude may also be the reason for her nearly unbelieveable hormonal response to the hunk she meets on a clandestine foray into the home office of a wealthy art patron.

Her reaction to “just” Dalton isn’t much different from his.  He works for a private security firm that has a large well-funded and mostly covert group of operatives working well outside the usual legal limits. Dalton, one of Blackthorn’s elite black ops operatives has an appreciated eye for female anatomy, wherever he finds it, including hiding under the desk of the aforementioned wealthy San Francisco Art patron.

Dalton and Miri Chambers are all fire and sparks and hot sex throughout this rollicking novel.  The author has created a pair of characters who could each carry the novel solo, but when you pair them, look out.

The action carries Dalton and Chambers from posh and elegant settings to gritty exceedingly dangerous operations.  Readers are not likely to predict each succeeding move.  One is required to suspend disbelief and recognize from the outset that explicit play, both sexual and firearms, is integral to the story.

Nevertheless, the plot is carefully and fully laid out, the dialogue is mostly logical and the tension carries well through the entire book. Gritty, tender, frustrating by turns I did feel that there were times when both characters exhibited too obtuse attitudes and were slower on the uptake than they should have been, given their life experiences.

Nevertheless, this is a fun read that makes several important points along the way.

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Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com Case of the Greedy Lawyer, Devils Island,
Bloody Halls, more at Kindle & Smashwords!

Happy Mother's Day

Wishing all mothers the best for a wonderful day. Hope you are celebrating and being celebrated with those you love.
Just for fun, I thought I would share an excerpt from my humorous memoir, A Dead Tomato Plant and a Paycheck that deals with the joys of motherhood. Enjoy....

Early on I learned to take my joys in little things, since the big things like Mother’s Day, Christmas, and my birthday only came once a year. Some days it was a thrill to take seven forks out of the silverware drawer and find them all clean. You may think that’s a bit pathetic, but you have to understand that it might have been year and a half since I’d taken a single clean fork out of the drawer and finding seven was like winning a Lotto jackpot.

Other days it was a thrill to tell the kids to start cleaning their rooms while I made a quick trip to the store and come home to find them actually doing it.

Another universal thrill for all mothers is to discover some random afternoon that we have fifteen full minutes to ourselves to do anything we want. As any experienced mother can tell you, there are all sorts of things one can accomplish in fifteen minutes. You can take half a bath. You can read twenty-two and a third pages in a book. You can start that letter you've been promising your sister for the last two years and hope that none of the news becomes ancient history by the time you finish it.

Or how about when we ask our kids who ate the last piece of cake, and one of them answers, "I did."

 If and when this ever happens to you, be very careful how you react. If your husband comes home from work and finds you wandering around the house in a daze with a silly grin on your face, he may lock the liquor cabinet, reserve a room in your name at the nearest mental hospital, or both.


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Don't forget the special sale on e-books starting today. Check my Friday blog for links to some bargain books.

Family Pets

Today my short story, The One O'Clock Nap is featured on Daily Cheap Reads, along with two books that sound really interesting. Every time I do one of these promotional gigs, I discover another new book to buy. LOL  Here is the link if anyone is interested in checking out the books and stories.

I haven't posted an excerpt from my humorous memoir in a while, so I thought I'd share a bit with you today. Enjoy....

Needless to say, we did not adopt one of the kittens, and for a while we thought we could survive without a pet. After a few months, however, it became clear that we were not the kind of family that could live without a four-footed friend. So I started looking for a dog, and we got Ruffy, who was part German Shepard and part wolf. He was a cute little fuzzy puppy who grew up into a good-sized dog, and he stayed outside. Except for the time something scared him and he crashed through the window on the French door leading into the house from the patio.

I was in the kitchen cleaning up from supper when I heard the commotion. Anjanette ran in and announced, “Ruffy came in?”

“Who let him in.”

“Nobody. He came through the window.”

“What window?”

“The window in the door.”

“But he’s huge and that window is small.”

By then, Ruffy had come into the kitchen and was checking under the table for scraps. I went into the living room, and sure enough, one pane of glass was broken out of the French door. Luckily, it had come out clean so there were no jagged edges that could have cut the dog, but still, I had to wonder how that great big dog fit through an opening about 8 inches by 12 inches.

Ruffy was quite fierce when storms weren’t scaring him. One time when the kids were out in the back playing and a neighbor tried to come through the gate, Ruffy sat like a growling sentinel and wouldn’t let the neighbor in. I had to tell my neighbor to always come to the front door when she wanted to visit.

When he wasn’t loose to play in the yard, Ruffy had a large pen and loved to run the perimeter while one of us squirted him with the hose. That was especially refreshing in the heat of a Texas summer, but it did have one downside. The weeds and grass grew like Jack’s beanstalk inside the pen.

Ruffy was always good for a romp or a walk, and it was undeniable that he wormed his way into all our hearts. Never was that more evident then when the kids did a survey at the dinner table and decided they all liked the dog better than me.