Code Red Hearts

by Ava Hawthorne

375 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2025

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m sorry to say I stopped reading this one at about 45%. I tried, but there were just so many things that bothered me. The story started out fine, though I must admit to being confused about the reasoning and legality of someone riding along on fire calls. I wish the author had explained it better. Pretty soon the story became kind of dry. It seemed like there were pages of radio communications between units/dispatch/etc. and short descriptions of the calls. Rinse and repeat. The two main characters, Braden and Zara, started out fine, too. But too soon they became kind of annoying in their perfection at their jobs. Zara especially did everything right, had an incredible memory, knew all sorts of things, asked all the right questions and on and on. And there was absolutely no chemistry between the two. (And I would be remiss in if I didn’t mention the one spicy scene I read was awful. One moment her back is to him and the next she’s facing him. And somehow it all happens with two fully grown adults in the front seat of a truck? What? Did no one edit this at all?) Then I started to notice the repetitions. First it was the author using the same address for different calls. Then it was the dialogue. The characters just repeated things over and over in slightly different ways. And there was so much repetition of the calls and dry descriptions. Another issue I had was that Braden has a control issue stemming from losing two men a few years ago. Within a day Zara not only recognized the issue but started ordering him around. She sounded like his therapist. So, yeah. At 45% I threw in the towel. The author needs to get an editor to work on this one and clean it up. There might be something there, but it’s a novella at best and needs to be devoid of a LOT of radio chatter. Not recommended.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.