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Olivia Prescott has everything…a beautiful home, a thriving company with her two best friends, a challenging career at the fire department, family and friends she loves, and then there’s Brownie, her beloved dog and best friend. She has everything…at least she did before the night she was attacked.
Now she’s trying to pick up the pieces of her life so she can move on, but there’s someone out there determined to keep her from the happiness she deserves and a man with dark, soulful eyes that keeps trying to get involved in her life. Is she ready for something more with him, or is she not ready for the complications of a relationship?
Gabriel Hughes is the CEO of his father’s security company that handles all types of dangerous situations around the world. He works long hours and he socializes only when he absolutely has to, but what he doesn’t expect are the dangers in his own life. Coming home from a long mission in Syria, Gabriel finds himself face to face with the one person in the world that can take on his millionaire attitude and put him in his place…but does he want to get involved with a woman who keeps trying to push him away and has a whole host of problems herself?
Will these two find the happiness they deserve with each other or will the dangers in their life collide and eliminate any chance they have?

Paperback

First published April 28, 2015

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478 people want to read

About the author

Annie Carlisle

52 books69 followers
Annie Carlisle is the author of steamy romantic suspense novels, including the beloved Hibiscus Harbor series. She crafts stories with resilient women and challenging men, offering readers a perfect mix of love, intrigue, and excitement.

A Florida native, Annie has worn many hats throughout her life, including working as a street paramedic and flight medic, but her favorite role has always been storytelling.

When she’s not writing, Annie is a lover of all animals, especially dogs. She’s an avid collector of all things Goofy and believes in the magic of happily ever after, both on and off the page. Married to a retired Sheriff’s Deputy, Annie enjoys spending time with her husband and their dogs, whether at the beach, the dog park, or relaxing at home.

To learn more about her work, visit her website: www.AnnieCarlisle.com.

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5 stars
41 (51%)
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16 (20%)
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19 (23%)
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1 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
9,376 reviews140 followers
September 30, 2021
This is an interesting story with strong characters in Olivia and Gabriel. The author brings it all in this one! There's drama,suspense and intrigue as well as all of the twists and turns ,tons of emotions and the steamy romance. It's well written,moves fluidly and is a thrilling page turner that had me glued to the pages right to the end and still wanting more with the books ending. I'm looking forward to the next book!

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own and freely given.
Profile Image for Brian Dingle.
Author 2 books6 followers
November 1, 2015
Sideways by Annie Carlisle ISBN 978-0-692-44313-2 Kindle. 4750 KB, 487 pages, about 140,000 words (I think…I had to count a few sentences and then estimate because Kindle/Amazon doesn’t tell me, or if they do, I don’t know where to find it)
The book is Romance Mystery as a genre. It is basically a love story of two people, Gabriel, a hard driving competent CEO of a security company, ex-military, with two very similar brothers in the same company; and Olivia, a Fire Fighter Paramedic who lives with her dog and is trying to recover from recent major trauma of a colleague’s death in her own kitchen. She is badly injured, and had a significant part to play in the violence at the scene, something that plagues her for months thereafter.
Although the main plot is the love story, a major subplot (or perhaps it is the other way around) is that Olivia is still being stalked by someone. Gabriel is involved in pursuing Olivia romantically, and then becomes involved in protecting her; but he has his own past to deal with as well, and the action builds as a result.
There is a lot of action, a lot of flirtation, a fair amount of sex (though probably not enough to turn off the prudish), and quite a lot of interesting and surprising character portrayal.
In fact, it is the character portrayal I am still puzzling over and fascinated by, and I guess that’s a good sign.
Gabriel has insensitive moments in the context of chauvinistic sensitivity, though he will quite quickly put his life on the line for Olivia. Olivia clearly has her own issues stemming from the trauma that begins the book, but you wonder if she didn’t have quite a few before. She is volatile, to say the least, and as a male, it is not clear to me that I would like her, no matter how beautiful she is.
And there is the question of her dating her patient, or of Gabriel dating his client, but not all heroes can be rigidly ethical.
The plot is interesting, though not unusual or different. It certainly held me all the way through.
The character development is quite good and most of the dialogue is believable. I am impressed by the book as a first novel.
The book is written in the first person present, which as an old guy, I always find both intriguing and difficult to get used to. It must be hard to write in, I think, and occasionally I thought I saw some blips in the thought process,but the author pulls it off.
More intriguing perhaps is the switch with each chapter of the point of view, explicitly stated at the Chapter Heading, as it goes back and forth between the two main characters (only once, I think, an incidental character).
This does introduce a technical problem. Dialogue attribution has to be well done, as does punctuation, in order that the reader not become confused. I am not a grammar snob, but when these technical issues get in the way of the flow of the book, it can be a problem, and it almost made me out the book down after the first three chapters.
Quite often, dialogue in quotations would end in a period, even though there was an attribution statement, such as the following: “Rescue 80 on scene.” Heather says into the microphone…
I know it’s a small point, but the period instead of a comma here, and so many other places in the book, had me searching to reassure myself who was talking.
I quickly figured out that empty lines were not a signal that the scene had changed, which is how I often show it my writing (many different ways), since the author uses some infinity sign for that, but every blank line I ran into had me guessing. The use of a bank line between paragraphs seemed random.
The use of ellipsis is inconsistent, and often four or five periods in a row. Now, I know what she is doing here, indicating hesitancy on the part of the speaker. The problem is that I think the flowing text of ebooks causes trouble with these, especially if a change in font requires hyphenation in a strange place. At one point I saw the word ‘still’ with a hyphen between the two ll’s, and I think it was because it was followed by five periods as an ellipsis. Most word processing treats three periods as an ellipsis, and spaces them differently, treating them as a single character.
Now the good news is that the technical stuff is really easy to fix. A word processor can easily search for all the typical punctuation problems like [end.” she said] or blank lines between paragraphs. And there are lots of other tricks to getting formatting right.
The problem with punctuation is that it is hard to find it in an easy reference all in one place, so I will flog a book and wouldn’t be without it (believe me, I have the same problems).
The Best Punctuation Book
I don’t know the author personally, nor have I any pecuniary interest. It’s just a really easy book to use, and as the title says, you’ll never need another.
'Sideways' is a good book. I don’t know why I chose it to review, because it is not even the genre I enjoy, but I believe that Indie authors should do that sort of thing to help us all ensure that independent publishing comes above the opinion traditional publishers have of us. So I am committing to doing this kind of review once a month, and I hope other authors do too.
I would give this book 3.8, which rounds up to 4 stars, but I’d probably give it 4.4 without the technical problems I found distracting, but which are easily fixed.
Profile Image for Coco.V.
50k reviews128 followers
Want to read
April 9, 2022
🎁 FREE on Amazon & on Apple iBooks today (4/9/2022)! 🎁
Profile Image for Mindy Bigham.
Author 6 books47 followers
November 24, 2015
*I received this book free from the author in exchange for an honest review*

Olivia Prescott has everything going for her. A career that she loves at the local fire department as well as a company that she runs with her two best friends. That is until she has a run in with her partner and he tries to kill her. Taking time off until she is released to go back to work she still has difficulties living a normal life. Maybe going back to work will help her overcome her “traumatic incident”. One of the first calls she receives back on the job and she has to deal with a very stubborn man.

“Crap, he has great eyes and a strong jaw, and the memory of his lips on mine are very difficult to forget. Who the hell wants to forget that? Oh, yes, me…because I’m an idiot. I just know it.”

Gabriel Hughes is CEO of Hughes International. He runs the family company with his two brothers. All being ex-military they do their job and do it very well. Gabriel has a minor traffic accident that has him completely drawn to the medic that is trying to bandage him up. He does know one thing for sure. He wants to know more about this woman.

Olivia things she is pretty much damaged goods when it comes to relationships. What she never expected is that someone is still after her. When someone breaks in to her home her brother decides that she needs to go away until he can find out what is going on. Asking a friend for a favor lands Olivia right into the Hughes brothers care. Being in another country seems to be fine until she realizes that the one “baby sitting” her is Gabriel and there just so happens to be a storm coming right at them. While Gabriel is trying to keep Olivia safe, he realizes that he has someone after him as well.

I really enjoyed this book so much that I didn’t want to put it down at all. I would be at work and could not wait for a break or lunch so I could continue reading. I love how strong Olivia tries to be for herself and for her family. I fell in love with Gabriel’s character. He is a true alpha but when it comes to Olivia he is not sure if he should love her or run. Of course this book has a lot of emotions in it. What Olivia has gone through really pulls at the heart strings.

One thing is for sure, when you read the last paragraph of this book, you will be searching for the second book in the series Always. I know I did!

My Favorite Moment: I really loved when Olivia said her thoughts out loud.

“I’ve seen this man undress once before and suddenly, all I want to do is lick him from head to toe. “I want to lick you.”

He stops what he is doing and looks at me, surprised. “You do?”

“I said that out loud, didn’t I?”
Profile Image for Jenni.
143 reviews22 followers
May 26, 2022

Olivia Prescott is returning to work as a paramedic four months after a life threatening work situation. She is not looking for anything more than getting through the day. Gabriel Hughes is the CEO of Hughes International, a private security firm runned by his family. He lives and breathes business but paramedic Olivia and her secrets are a distraction.
This is the first book in a series and ends on a cliffhanger, there is no HEA here. There is a good foundation and the characters are interesting. However, the pacing is a bit slow and conversations between characters can be a bit repetitive. Olivia is obviously not as fine as she would like to believe following the incident that left her unable to work. She really needed some more critical incident stress debriefing. She realizes that eventually but certainly does not approach it in a healthy way. You can tell the author has experience in emergency services as these characters and situations are pretty true to life. However, Gabriel’s character fell a little short of believable for me. He runs a well known international security firm with special training and does not find out more information on his own. I like that he is being respectful of Olivia as a person but as she continues to put her own life at risk, I would have liked to see more from him.
As I said before, there is no HEA or even a HFN. This is a debut book, so I give some leadacy that I might not give to veteran writers. It is well edited grammatically, with a few inconsistencies. There is a good base plot here but it feels a bit drawn out and am not sure it is enough to keep me reading.
Profile Image for Nick Rossi.
166 reviews7 followers
November 19, 2015
This one's a keeper.

In "Sideways: The Sideways Series Book 1", author Annie Carisle manages to create a mash-up of sorts of all the elements that make fiction so great. She incorporates intrigue and intensity, throws in some humour before things get too intense, and then comes back and throws in some gut-wrenching plot points.

In "Sideways", our protagonist has a picture-perfect existence, which any seasoned reader will instantly knows is a catalyst for pending unraveling. Olive Prescott, said heroine, is viciously attached one night, forcing her to reevaluate her stance on life.

There are some roadblocks to Olivia's road to happiness, primarily one man who is described as having "dark, soulful eyes" who keeps trying to integrate himself in Olivia's life. This throws another wrench in Olivia's current attack-induced state of second guessing herself and her romantic choices.

But wait! This book is also told from the POV of said man with the eyes. Gabriel Hughes, a savant when it comes to security and investigations, is enamored with Olivia but is unsure, as Olivia is, if romance is something that should go from in-the-cards to something more real.

The novel gracefully moves from a contemplation of human emotions to the more visceral needs of human life. It's an interesting exploration of the choices we make, as well as with the coping mechanisms we have adopted with the choices that have already been made.

Like this review? Read more like it at www.readingotherpeople.com
Profile Image for Teresa.
364 reviews13 followers
November 30, 2015
Romance, suspense, mystery, death, and emotional trauma. What more could you ask for? Our story opens with Olivia, a paramedic/firefighter who is recovering from a violent attack. On her first day back at work she answers a call to an accident where she meets a man who basically refuses treatment. Gabriel, CEO of his family security company, is a busy man. Soon they cross paths again. He irritates her, she irritates him. BAM, we know where this is going.. Danger pops it's nasty head when she is targeted by an unknown stalker. Friends of friends and family come to her aide when she needs to lay low. Guess who. :)

I loved the progression of this relationship. Slowburns are my favorite. Toss in some mystery and I am happy.. I was stymied as to who the bad "guy" was right up to the confrontation. Can't say more.. ;)

My only "dangit" was the cliffhanger.. I was happy with the length of the book so I didn't mind it too much.. I am looking forward to reading the next book..

“I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review”.


Profile Image for Lyans.
15 reviews8 followers
November 1, 2015
I won this book in a giveaway. Thank you!

I loved Olivia, she was a really strong character, and Gabriel (good work in the man perspective). Their relationship is funny and cute at the same time. The book is more romance than mystery but it works well in both sides. Usually I think that "female romances" are boring, but I saw me loosing myself in the plot until I finished it in a go. My favorite part is her job, it's interesting to look at their work, I could see myself reading a book only about their missions.
There is some sex scenes and dirty talk, but not that much (and that's a point from me since I think nowadays a lot of the focus goes into that, leaving the storylines messed up and neglected. That is not the case in this book however). The author kept things interesting, so I hope the sequel is was good as the first one. I recommend it for romance lovers with a liking to danger and an overprotective lover.
Profile Image for Joann.
46 reviews4 followers
October 5, 2015
Firstly, thanks to Goodreads and Annie Carlisle for providing me a free copy of this book.

There is a lot to love about this book. I quite enjoy mysteries and this definitely fit the bill. Without ruining the plot, I'll just say Olivia is recovering from a traumatic event, thrust into another, and then another! The author does a great job of keeping you on your toes, wondering what is going to happen next.

The book is also very much a romance as well. Although I do like romantic story lines in mysteries, there was just a bit too much for me (but that's just my taste). I'm not one to like sex talk but that's just me and I know other's may find that enjoyable.
Profile Image for Cheryl Webb .
503 reviews15 followers
November 3, 2017
I liked the overall story in this book, however I found myself getting bored at times and felt like it was dragging. It is a fairly long book and I think the author could have shortened the story, still had good character development and tell the story in a way where the story isn’t rushed. I liked the characters for the most part. There were times that both the male and female leads annoyed me.

I think this book has great potential.

1 review
August 14, 2022
I love a good slow-burn romance! Add in a character with a traumatic back story and a hot protector hero who wants nothing more than to help her heal and Annie Carlisle mixed up one of my favorite recipes. Loved the mix of suspense and mystery in the plot. There was a cliffhanger in the end, but I loved that it meant I could keep reading Olivia and Gabriel's story, because I didn't want it to end!
627 reviews
October 16, 2021
Such a great collection! I really enjoyed it and I could not put it down. I would definitely recommend this author!

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
Profile Image for Pat.
1,076 reviews35 followers
November 9, 2024
Suspense romance and adventure. Involving former military man and a paratrooper firefighter. I enjoyed the drama in each chapter and the flow. I’m invested in the characters enough to read the next book. *I was given a copy via StoryOrgin and am voluntarily giving my honest review.
Profile Image for Angela.
815 reviews2 followers
January 31, 2022
Love

Oh Lordy! The cliffhanger is killing me. I really enjoyed the storyline and the character development. I can’t wait to read the next one!
400 reviews3 followers
April 3, 2022
adventure

Lots of action, romance, bossy people, and high tension events. Keeps you on your seat - tho you may want to flip past the bedroom scenes as I did.
Profile Image for Sheila Jones.
4 reviews
May 20, 2022
great book

Good read and great cliffhanger Gabriel is the perfect man and loves the right way. Alana and piper are the perfect friends
15 reviews
May 29, 2022
Couldn’t put it down and couldn’t wait to read the next one. Suspense at the end of every chapter. Romance and adventures at every turn.
Profile Image for Virginia.
9,263 reviews23 followers
May 29, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews

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