RED ZONE

TITLE: RED ZONE

AUTHOR: SHERRI HAYES

Pages: 287

Date: 25/02/2013

Grade: 4+

Details: no. 2 Daniels Brothers

            Received from The Writer’s Coffee Shop

            Through NetGalley

Own / Kindle

Back Cover Copy:

After a case ended badly for Rebecca Carson, she’s losing her mind sitting around her apartment waiting on her superiors to allow her to return to work. Since she was a teenager, the only thing she’d ever wanted was to join the FBI. Now that dream was in danger.
Gage Daniels has made a pretty good life for himself. A nice house. A career he loves. As a professional football player, he’s used to getting almost everything he’d ever want with just the snap of his fingers. This includes women. A well-timed smile is usually all it takes to attract the opposite sex, especially in Nashville.
When a stalker threatens Gage, the team owner calls an old friend, Rebecca’s ex-partner Travis Hansen, to help protect his star quarterback and find the person responsible. Hansen offers Rebecca the job, and she jumps at the chance. It’s work, and it will get her out of her apartment. How bad can it be?
Posing as Gage’s girlfriend, however, isn’t as easy as it seems. The man is relentless. Rebecca must work to protect Gage while staving off his advances. She’s there to do a job, nothing more. The last thing she wants is to be another notch on a hotshot athlete’s belt.
As the stalker continues to up the ante, Rebecca finds it harder and harder to keep her distance from Nashville’s star quarterback. He isn’t what she expected in one of the city’s most notorious playboys. Now all she has to do is keep him safe until they can find his stalker, and hope she doesn’t lose her heart in the process.

My thoughts:

This is a charming and very well written romance. I’ve read books by Sherri Hayes before and was fully expecting to love her writing; it was rewarding to find she didn’t disappoint.

With Gage and Rebecca, Hayes has created two believable and likable characters. Gage is the ultimate sport-star, playboy bad-boy while Rebecca is a rather uptight, set in her ways investigator. At first sight the two have nothing in common and even less to attract them to each other. From the first moment they see each other though there is something there, a spark that can’t be denied. For Gage this starts as the urge to get this tightly wound woman to relax while Rebecca is finding it ever harder to stay strictly professional when her body seems to have other ideas.

In a lot of romances it is the woman who finds herself head-over-heals with a man reluctant to commit to anything more than a bit of fun. Reading a book in which those roles are reversed made for a very nice change. Gage, coming from a stable and loving family, is a lot quicker to acknowledge that he has feelings for this woman and wants to take their pretend relationship into reality. Rebecca, who isn’t quite sure what a stable family life looks and feels like, has very set ideas about what her future and the man in it should look like, and Gage isn’t it. The way in which they grow closer, despite Rebecca’s best efforts to keep a distance between them, is both realistic and heartwarming.

The dialogue between the characters sparkles and the story flows smoothly, without any dead moments. Most importantly there is no over-the-top drama in this book. At no point did I feel that the reaction of one of the characters was contrived. Whatever Gage and Rebecca thought and felt made perfect sense within the context of the story and I just love it when I find myself reading a novel in which I don’t end up wanting to smack one or more of the main characters. And the same is true for the secondary characters; they were all written in such a way that they felt real and worthy of their role in the story. And I can’t wait to see what will happen next to Megan, Rebecca’s younger sister, although I have my suspicions.

I loved the part of the story set in the Daniels’ family home during Thanksgiving. The interactions in that family were fun and loving and made me want to read more about these four brothers and their individual journeys towards finding the loves of their lives. And since I haven’t read the first book, “Behind Closed Doors” yet and the other two books are yet to be written, I’ve got some quality romances to look forward to.

Finally, the stalker part of the story really works as well. While the identity of the stalker didn’t come as a huge surprise to me when it was revealed, I liked the way in which this element was integrated into the story. The romance is definitely the main focus of this book but the addition of the stalker gave the story that extra sense of urgency while never taking the story into unrealistic spheres.

In conclusion I would like to congratulate Sherri Hayes on writing yet another story that was almost impossible to put down once I’d started it. While I think I loved the first two “Finding Anna” books ("Slave" and Need) even more, I really can’t find fault with this book at all. This book comes highly recommended for anyone who loves a good, sexy and suspenseful romance.

Author Bio:

Sherri is the author of four novels: Hidden Threat, Slave (Finding Anna Book 1), Need (Finding Anna Book 2), Behind Closed Doors (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), Red Zone (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), and a short story, A Christmas Proposal. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and three cats. Her mother fostered her love for books at a young age by reading to her as a child. Stories have been floating around in her head for as long as she can remember; however, she didn’t start writing them down until she turned thirty. It has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions, while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found helping her husband in his woodworking shop.