Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Butcher:

Jayne’s review of No Control got me interested in reading your books. Jayne isn’t the biggest fan of romantic suspense so her B- review of your book is a golden recommendation to me. But many of the things that bothered Jayne in her review of No Control bothered me in No Escape and with one scene in the middle of the book, the entire story went down the drain for me.

The basic plot of the story is this: The hero, Grant Kent, a former special forces guy going to work for a private investigative agency/protection agency/security firm, stops by a girl he once knew in foster care. He killed a man for her and he’s never forgotten how in the short amount of time that they were together he grew to care for her. (Killing a guy for a girl kind of imprints that girl on a guy’s mind, I would imagine).

Isabel Carson has recovered from her nightmarish childhood where she shared a foster home for a brief time with Grant Kent. Even though she has not seen him in 14 years, …

Dear Mrs. Butcher,

A friend of mine recommended this book as one in which there isn’t too much gratuitous violence. Since I loathe play-by-play descriptions of the evil people can do to each other, I paid attention and noted the title. As she said, it isn’t so much a slice by slice commentary of what was done to the heroine as a psychological study of what the heroine goes through afterwards and how the hero handles what he had to do in the name of justice.

I really appreciate the fact that you manage to convey the seriousness of what the heroine endured while not dwelling on the details. There’s enough there to know the physical and mental anguish she was subjected to while in the hands of the terrorist wannabes as she was beaten and watched her friends die. The fact that the hero was undercover and thus couldn’t interfere with what he was forced to watch happen or else risk the lives of countless others was a realistic way to set up the hero/heroine conflict.

That the heroine might have glimpsed the faces of some of her kidnappers and thus be in danger from them …