Ketika sampai di Lembah Los Angeles yang porak-poranda akibat gempa, Lt. Quinn Grayson menyaksikan kehancuran total di mana-mana. Tetapi ketika menatap mata Deputy Sheriff Kerry Chelton, salah seorang korban yang selamat, Quinn melihat harapan terpancar di sana. Kerry dengan semangat tinggi menjaga kelangsungan hidup para korban gempa---sehingga Quinn dan tim elitenya tiba. Kini si jelita yang kelelahan itu dapat membagi bebannya bersama Quinn. Walau baru bertemu dalam waktu singkat, prajurit gagah berani itu telah mengisi jiwa Kerry dengan keinginan untuk hidup. Dan dalam pelukan Quinn, Kerry berharap tentara penyendiri ini dapat menemukan keinginan untuk mencintai...dirinya.
I've lived six lives in one and it all shows up in the books I write, one way or another.
I was always a risk taker and broke mustangs at thirteen years old in Oregon. I learn to break them with love, not threat or pain.
At 17 years old, I picked night-crawlers (worms) out in our Oregon orchards from 9pm to midnight, every night. I earned enough money to buy my school clothes and book. I also plunked down $600 to a flight company at the Medford, Oregon airport and asked them to teach me...a girl...to fly. I soloed in 12 hours, which is average. From that time until I left for the US Navy at 18, I had accrued 39 hours of flight time in my Cessna 150 single engine airplane.
I was in the US military and was an AG3 (weather forecaster). There was no airplane club, so I couldn't fly when I was in the Navy. But I could look at the clouds in the sky ;-).
Later, I flew in a B-52 bomber for a day and night mission (18 hours total), a T-38 Talon jet, USAF, where I was riding in a "chase plane" on a test flight in a Dragonfly jet.
I was one of the first AFLA (American Fencing League of America) women fencers to fence with epee and sabre. These weapons were closed to women because they were too 'heavy' for a female to handle. I said baloney and fought the males and won half my bouts. I was part of a surge of women fencers on the East Coast in the 1970's to push for equality in the sport. Together, we changed the sport and changed the mind of the men. Today? In the Olympics? Women now fence in foil, epee and sabre, thanks to what we did as a vanguard showing the world it could be done.
I then became a volunteer firefighter when I was a civilian once more, the first woman in an all - male fire department in West Point, Ohio for three years. I became a local expert not only in firefighting, driving the engine and tanker trunks, but also had training in hazardous material (Reynoldsburg Fire Academy, Columbus, OH).
My books always reflect what I experienced. If you like edgy, gritty, deeply and emotionally intense love stories with sympathetic heroes and heroines, check out my newest series that will be available mid-Oct. 2015, and it incorporates much of what I have lived.
So this book is the third of many in an interconnected series, and while that doesn't always matter, it did hinder overall enjoyment of this one. Nothing I can help since this was one romance of many passed along to me in a huge pile--I'm not sure my friend who passed them along even has the others. But also not enough to make me skip reading it altogether. I don't feel the need to actively track down the others but I figure I'd nab any others if I ran into them.
The premise is novel and intriguing, and too much for one book. I might like the premise and the hub of characters and the potential therein most of all.
For being in command of an unfolding disaster the leads spend most of their page time navel gazing about their feelings for one another and delivering half-page explanations about those feelings. It got tedious.
The writing is some repetitious and florid. I don't mind some spelled out emotion or harder-hitting moments, but there was something too-too here. Also the head-hopping was quick and see-saw.
Lots of crammed in exposition, the characters thinking through "glad I know what this phrase/ piece of equipment/ regs means! because that way I know what it means!" stuff. This works as an occasional device but was relied on enough it became noticeable. It felt like we got more details about the tent the hero made sure the heroine got and everything he stocked the small fridge with and the layout of the nearby navy base than plot advancements.
I thought the injury to the heroine was a cheat. The book escaped having to resolve anything on the ground -- good to move the leads into a quiet space to get their HEA, but bad regarding every other aspect of the plot to that point. She could still be injured and their emotions thrown to the forefront and it used as a catalyst, but to end it with them 'out' of the survival zone (and brooding with guilt for being out) with brief updates from there isn't the absolute worst. And I do understand room was left for the next book to happen, bit to kick the heroine out so dramatically in what wasn't really the climax, just pretending to be, and then buttoning up with "well we're going back, but as a couple! let's save people and get bad guys" didn't do anything justice.
The epilogue really isn't one. Maybe it felt too short and considered too much of a set up for the next book to be a chapter.
With all these gripes it sounds like I outright disliked it but nah, it was fine. I do wonder why everyone involved insisted it remain a category however, and not given it room to be some version of a 'super' or longer romance. These are stories that needed more space to be told and they suffered for that.
Sidebar: every time they said or thought some iteration of "but this is what happens in a third world country! not AMERICA!" I couldn't stop my 'lol, please' lefty-brained thoughts from intruding on my reading. The hero from the hills of Kentucky who fought in Afghanistan was shocked at the conditions people were surviving in? The sheriff's deputy heroine who'd been on the force for a while couldn't believe it either? America is too land of the free and plentiful for folk to suffer in the aftermath of a state-ruining natural disaster? Hrumph.
Ceritanya rentang waktunya pendek banget, cuma beberapa minggu... tapi penggambaran dan pemaparan ceritanya membuatku serasa ada di dalam cerita itu... kalo yang ngarepin ada uhuk-uhuk jangan baca deh, inti ceritanya ttg rasa kemanusiaan sehabis gempa besar di lembah los angeles
Ceritanya terlalu pendek,rasanya jadi kurang greget. Kurang digali lebih dalam lagi. Endingnya juga agak nanggung,seperti dipaksakan supaya cepat selesai. Padahal jalan ceritanya bagus, sayang banget