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Southern Series #3
Hell On Wheels
Cody Carlisle has a reputation for being a bad ass bounty hunter. She was raised by an alcoholic mother and she has no idea who her father is, so yeah, she had to grow up fast. Her survival depended on it. She doesn’t need anyone, especially a player like Josh Pierce.
Josh Pierce, ex undercover agent turned bounty hunter. Cody is the only thorn in his side because he’s never wanted a woman as badly as he wants her. Except she won’t have anything to do with him.
When they grudgingly team up to go after a felon, Josh and Cody find they’re in way over their heads. The Mexican police don’t take kindly to bounty hunters so Josh does the only thing he can do—he lies and tells El Capitan they only want to get married.
It goes downhill from there…..
Josh Pierce, ex undercover agent turned bounty hunter. Cody is the only thorn in his side because he’s never wanted a woman as badly as he wants her. Except she won’t have anything to do with him.
When they grudgingly team up to go after a felon, Josh and Cody find they’re in way over their heads. The Mexican police don’t take kindly to bounty hunters so Josh does the only thing he can do—he lies and tells El Capitan they only want to get married.
It goes downhill from there…..
318 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 30, 2006
75 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
About the author
Karen Kelley
106 books223 followersKaren Kelley always had a secret desire to live the life of a Gypsy. So she and her husband quit their jobs, sold their house, decluttered their lives and moved into their 5th wheel RV. Now they're traveling the United States. She works full time on her writing and spends her downtime walking on the beach or hiking in the mountains. Her motto has always been 'Who says you can't have it all.'
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 29, 2015
Reviewed for THC Reviews
The first two books of Karen Kelley's Southern series were OK reads for me, so I went into reading Hell on Wheels with fairly low expectations. In fact, if it weren't for me using this series for a reading challenge I'm working on, I would have been tempted to skip ahead to the final novella and possibly call it quits, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed this book better than her others. I find this rather odd too, because Hell on Wheels is the lowest rated book of the series on GoodReads, yet I liked it the best so far. This one has less suspense than the first two, which might partly account for why most readers didn't like it as much, but for me it worked well. I had felt like the suspense plot and the sexy scenes were unbalanced in the first two books with one or the other making some sections of those stories top-heavy. That wasn't really the case here, since Hell on Wheels was pretty much a straight-up contemporary. There's a little action but no suspense to speak of. It may have been a bit less exciting, but I felt like the narrative flowed a lot better and more evenly.
At least in this series, Karen Kelley seems to have certain go-to character archetypes. Much like the heroines of the previous two books, Cody is an alpha female who works as a bounty hunter and she's damn good at her job. She had a rough life growing up. Her father left her mother before Cody was born, so she knows nothing about him and her mother isn't exactly being forthcoming. Her mother also spent much of Cody's childhood at the bottom of a bottle. She did have a long-term boyfriend to whom Cody became attached as a father-figure. He taught her to fight and do many of the things she does today, but he also left without warning. As a result, Cody has trust issues and believes that to care about anyone means that they'll leave her. Also like the previous two heroines, she's not a relationship kind of gal, but instead prefers one-night stands, but at least her reasons seemed more sound to me. She's also a little softer and slightly less edgy than the previous heroines, so I liked her better. As the book opens, she's very obviously attracted to Josh, but she's fighting the idea of sleeping with him. She knows he's a playboy and has no desire to become just another notch in his bedpost. In the end though, it doesn't take long for her resistance to wear down, and once they've done the deed, it's so good, she just can't get enough of him. But that doesn't stop her from being afraid he'll break her heart eventually. She tries to guard her heart against his inevitable leaving, but ultimately she can't resist taking the chance over and over. As a little aside here, the name Cody for a woman was a little jarring for me. I know it can be used interchangeably as a male or female name, but it's much more commonly used as a male name. Therefore, I kept getting her name mixed up with the hero's when the POVs switched.
Again, like the first two heroes in the series, Josh is a sexy charmer. He used to be an undercover police detective, but he gave up that life to become a bounty hunter. It pays better, and he's been saving up, hoping to open his own private detective business. He's as good a bounty hunter as Cody, so they respect each other as equals on the job. They also prove to work well together. Much like the first two heroes in the series, I felt like Josh was lacking a certain depth to his character. A couple of times, he experiences nightmares that I thought might go somewhere, but they didn't. He says very little about them, just that it was an undercover operation gone bad, in which a young woman was killed and he somehow felt rather responsible. I think if the author had explored this part of his life a little more, he would have been a more interesting character, but I still liked him. He didn't seem to be nearly as much of a dog as Cody initially thought. In fact, he appeared to be very kind and considerate of female sensitivities, even though Cody isn't a particularly sensitive woman. Cody's temperamental nature is a point he uses often to tell himself it would never work between them, but he's still mostly amused by that side of her rather than off-put. He's also very vocal about how beautiful and sexy he finds Cody even though she doesn't entirely believe him. And he's as completely into her as she is into him.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the emotional connection between Josh and Cody was a lot more palpable too. I could tell from the opening pages that they were totally hot for one another. That and them knowing each other for a while before the story opens made their quick hook-up much more believable for me. Even though they both fight their feelings pretty much all the way to the end, I still felt the connection because it was obvious from their body language and the way they were behaving that they were falling in love and just couldn't see it for themselves. Luckily fate intervened to bring them together in a way they might not have connected on their own. Also the love scenes in the first two books just didn't quite do it for me, but in this one, I thought they were much better written. They're longer, more descriptive, and contain lots of the steam I expect from a Brava romance. I very much enjoyed their sexy bantering too. All of these things came together to make me believe in their burgeoning love and rightness for one another.
While Hell on Wheels was better for me than the other books of the series so far, it still wasn't perfect. Like I mentioned earlier, I felt like the author could have deepened her characterizations more, particularly Josh's, and the plot could have been a little tighter. I'd also like to see her branch out a bit more and try writing some different types of characters besides the alpha female loner and the charming Southern playboy. Ms. Kelley also has a tendency to overuse certain words and character actions. In this book, she repeatedly uses the word 'skip' to refer to the bail jumpers Josh and Cody go after. I'm all for using lingo to set the atmosphere but the amount of times she uses that one word, especially in the opening chapters, was complete overkill. As with the last book of the series her characters are constantly opening their mouths and snapping them shut. Not only was it repetitive, but wording it this way reminds me of an alligator or some other wild animal. I kept thinking these poor people were going to need a dentist pretty soon.:-) Otherwise though, I generally enjoyed Hell on Wheels. It's kind of on the lighter side, more so than I typically like to read, but at least the heroine was more relatable and IMHO the book was better written. Now I just have the final novella, Southern Star (previously titled It's a Wonderful Life from the anthology I'm Your Santa), to read, so we'll see how that goes before I make a determination on whether Karen Kelley stays on my TBR list.
Hell on Wheels is the third book in the Southern series, but it can easily be read as a stand-alone. It's only connection to the other books is that Josh used to work with and is still good friends with Wade, the hero of book #1, Southern Comfort. Wade's name pops up several times, but no carry-over characters are actually seen in the story. I think Josh may have been introduced in book #1 too, but my memory is a bit foggy on that, and since I don't own a copy, I can't confirm it for sure.
The first two books of Karen Kelley's Southern series were OK reads for me, so I went into reading Hell on Wheels with fairly low expectations. In fact, if it weren't for me using this series for a reading challenge I'm working on, I would have been tempted to skip ahead to the final novella and possibly call it quits, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed this book better than her others. I find this rather odd too, because Hell on Wheels is the lowest rated book of the series on GoodReads, yet I liked it the best so far. This one has less suspense than the first two, which might partly account for why most readers didn't like it as much, but for me it worked well. I had felt like the suspense plot and the sexy scenes were unbalanced in the first two books with one or the other making some sections of those stories top-heavy. That wasn't really the case here, since Hell on Wheels was pretty much a straight-up contemporary. There's a little action but no suspense to speak of. It may have been a bit less exciting, but I felt like the narrative flowed a lot better and more evenly.
At least in this series, Karen Kelley seems to have certain go-to character archetypes. Much like the heroines of the previous two books, Cody is an alpha female who works as a bounty hunter and she's damn good at her job. She had a rough life growing up. Her father left her mother before Cody was born, so she knows nothing about him and her mother isn't exactly being forthcoming. Her mother also spent much of Cody's childhood at the bottom of a bottle. She did have a long-term boyfriend to whom Cody became attached as a father-figure. He taught her to fight and do many of the things she does today, but he also left without warning. As a result, Cody has trust issues and believes that to care about anyone means that they'll leave her. Also like the previous two heroines, she's not a relationship kind of gal, but instead prefers one-night stands, but at least her reasons seemed more sound to me. She's also a little softer and slightly less edgy than the previous heroines, so I liked her better. As the book opens, she's very obviously attracted to Josh, but she's fighting the idea of sleeping with him. She knows he's a playboy and has no desire to become just another notch in his bedpost. In the end though, it doesn't take long for her resistance to wear down, and once they've done the deed, it's so good, she just can't get enough of him. But that doesn't stop her from being afraid he'll break her heart eventually. She tries to guard her heart against his inevitable leaving, but ultimately she can't resist taking the chance over and over. As a little aside here, the name Cody for a woman was a little jarring for me. I know it can be used interchangeably as a male or female name, but it's much more commonly used as a male name. Therefore, I kept getting her name mixed up with the hero's when the POVs switched.
Again, like the first two heroes in the series, Josh is a sexy charmer. He used to be an undercover police detective, but he gave up that life to become a bounty hunter. It pays better, and he's been saving up, hoping to open his own private detective business. He's as good a bounty hunter as Cody, so they respect each other as equals on the job. They also prove to work well together. Much like the first two heroes in the series, I felt like Josh was lacking a certain depth to his character. A couple of times, he experiences nightmares that I thought might go somewhere, but they didn't. He says very little about them, just that it was an undercover operation gone bad, in which a young woman was killed and he somehow felt rather responsible. I think if the author had explored this part of his life a little more, he would have been a more interesting character, but I still liked him. He didn't seem to be nearly as much of a dog as Cody initially thought. In fact, he appeared to be very kind and considerate of female sensitivities, even though Cody isn't a particularly sensitive woman. Cody's temperamental nature is a point he uses often to tell himself it would never work between them, but he's still mostly amused by that side of her rather than off-put. He's also very vocal about how beautiful and sexy he finds Cody even though she doesn't entirely believe him. And he's as completely into her as she is into him.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the emotional connection between Josh and Cody was a lot more palpable too. I could tell from the opening pages that they were totally hot for one another. That and them knowing each other for a while before the story opens made their quick hook-up much more believable for me. Even though they both fight their feelings pretty much all the way to the end, I still felt the connection because it was obvious from their body language and the way they were behaving that they were falling in love and just couldn't see it for themselves. Luckily fate intervened to bring them together in a way they might not have connected on their own. Also the love scenes in the first two books just didn't quite do it for me, but in this one, I thought they were much better written. They're longer, more descriptive, and contain lots of the steam I expect from a Brava romance. I very much enjoyed their sexy bantering too. All of these things came together to make me believe in their burgeoning love and rightness for one another.
While Hell on Wheels was better for me than the other books of the series so far, it still wasn't perfect. Like I mentioned earlier, I felt like the author could have deepened her characterizations more, particularly Josh's, and the plot could have been a little tighter. I'd also like to see her branch out a bit more and try writing some different types of characters besides the alpha female loner and the charming Southern playboy. Ms. Kelley also has a tendency to overuse certain words and character actions. In this book, she repeatedly uses the word 'skip' to refer to the bail jumpers Josh and Cody go after. I'm all for using lingo to set the atmosphere but the amount of times she uses that one word, especially in the opening chapters, was complete overkill. As with the last book of the series her characters are constantly opening their mouths and snapping them shut. Not only was it repetitive, but wording it this way reminds me of an alligator or some other wild animal. I kept thinking these poor people were going to need a dentist pretty soon.:-) Otherwise though, I generally enjoyed Hell on Wheels. It's kind of on the lighter side, more so than I typically like to read, but at least the heroine was more relatable and IMHO the book was better written. Now I just have the final novella, Southern Star (previously titled It's a Wonderful Life from the anthology I'm Your Santa), to read, so we'll see how that goes before I make a determination on whether Karen Kelley stays on my TBR list.
Hell on Wheels is the third book in the Southern series, but it can easily be read as a stand-alone. It's only connection to the other books is that Josh used to work with and is still good friends with Wade, the hero of book #1, Southern Comfort. Wade's name pops up several times, but no carry-over characters are actually seen in the story. I think Josh may have been introduced in book #1 too, but my memory is a bit foggy on that, and since I don't own a copy, I can't confirm it for sure.
why-that-awful-cover
June 16, 2019Ehm... should we talk about the cover?
I....I.... don't know what to say.
I....I.... don't know what to say.
June 16, 2019
3.25 stars
Not too bad but now that I have read a couple by this author I see the pattern, her heroine's have deep damage from family and are major commitment phobes and kick-ass. The hero's reasons for being foot-loose and fancy free didn't make much sense. Overall decent enough read.
Not too bad but now that I have read a couple by this author I see the pattern, her heroine's have deep damage from family and are major commitment phobes and kick-ass. The hero's reasons for being foot-loose and fancy free didn't make much sense. Overall decent enough read.
December 5, 2018
3.5 🌟🌟🌟
Id waited a long time to read this book as I had read the previous 2 in the series and absolutely loved them. This wasn't quite the same. Whilst it was written very well and had some super hot steamy scenes I just felt plot wise it was lacking that something that the others had. The suspense element wasn't really hitting home for me with this one. The story of trying to put the past behind and fall in love was beautiful and in its on great but not quite what I was expecting.
However I did still fall in love with the characters and was totally rooting for them as they were perfect together.
Id waited a long time to read this book as I had read the previous 2 in the series and absolutely loved them. This wasn't quite the same. Whilst it was written very well and had some super hot steamy scenes I just felt plot wise it was lacking that something that the others had. The suspense element wasn't really hitting home for me with this one. The story of trying to put the past behind and fall in love was beautiful and in its on great but not quite what I was expecting.
However I did still fall in love with the characters and was totally rooting for them as they were perfect together.
April 9, 2019
I had read the other two in the series several years ago and will go back to my keeper shelf and reread them. You do not have to read this series in order. It was an enjoyable read about two bounty hunters with commitment issues. The HEA wrapped up abruptly in a few pages at the end. I will say that the cover is misleading. Not only does the male model not fit Josh's description but the motorcycle pictured is not ridden by Josh but by our intrepid heroine, Cody.
April 16, 2019
Bounty Huntress
Cody was a kick ass woman who just about always got the skip. Josh had gotten out of police work and chased skips to raise money for a PI business. When the crossed paths they both sizzled. Can a partnership lead to something? Fun romance adventure. Recommend.
Cody was a kick ass woman who just about always got the skip. Josh had gotten out of police work and chased skips to raise money for a PI business. When the crossed paths they both sizzled. Can a partnership lead to something? Fun romance adventure. Recommend.
August 7, 2009
Good read. Action-oriented contemporary romance. The characters are fun - both bounty hunters [can you say competitive?:] with issues. As the story progresses he finally finds someone he likes better than his precious car - but now he needs someway to convince her that they can have a forever...
It's a fun, sexy, read although some of the plot devices are a bit over the top. I enjoyed it.
It's a fun, sexy, read although some of the plot devices are a bit over the top. I enjoyed it.
October 9, 2025
Cody and Josh are bounty hunters on the same trail. Each want to get their man. They decide to work together to get the big bad instead of working solo. But this also opens up their feelings for each other. I enjoyed this final novel in this trilogy. I like that I have an author I share initials with for reading challenges.
November 16, 2009
Oh cuuuuuuuuuuute story and hunky man and spunky girl. My favorite ingredients for a good romance. The end was a little too sudden...of course you know how it will end but I wanted to see more of the happy joining, wink wink nudge nudge. Good sex scenes and a fun read. I recommend for fun!
November 5, 2007
read 11.08.06
August 3, 2016
This was a big fat DNF for me. The writing was choppy, the heroine immature and cold, and the plot wasn't interesting. Waste of time to even try reading a third of it.
June 5, 2012
It was so bad I could not read the other book I got from the library by the same author.
December 11, 2009
3 stars – Contemporary Romance
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews