Hot Target, Suzanne Brockmann

I am pleased to report that this book rocks. I may have stayed up until midnight last night and then read all morning at school. This is why Brockmann gets the benefit of the doubt from me; this is a thriller and a love story plus -- MAJOR BONUS POINTS -- one of the subplots is a gay romance. 

Brockmann can tell, obviously, that the subplot is more interesting than the "real" plot, so the hetero couple get together really quickly with a minimum of fuss. She's a movie producer being threatened because she's making a flick about a WWII pilot who was gay. He's a temporary bodyguard and Navy SEAL. They fall in love, she almost dies, the end. (I'm not being fair; they're both interesting characters I would have liked a lot in another book. But I just kept skimming ahead because...)

The good part is where her younger brother, the star of the movie and an infamous womanizer, suddenly finds himself for no obvious reason obsessed with the FBI agent assigned to her (Jules, who's been popping up here and there in the series all along). Jules has absolutely no interest in being a straight-boy's experiment, plus, his ex-boyfriend (an actor, of course)   just showed up in town and wants, in his own self-centered way, to apologize to Jules. Kinda. Just in case Jules can get him a job on the aforementioned movie. Got all that? There's no happily ever after, here, (this is another of Brockmann's drawn-out plot lines, with Jules, Robin, and Adam all showing up off and on in books for the rest of the series) but there is quite a bit of growth. Adam might not be the creep Jules thinks he is. Robin is certainly not as straight as he claims to be. Jules is really bad at telling people no. It's awesome.

This goes back, of course, to my love of stories about relationships. I like a good background story -- saving the world will do, or nearly anything that gives characters a chance to be brave and adventurous. (This is where my dislike of most modern fiction comes to play; I don't caaaaaaaaaare about people who've broken up or have dead friends or go to work. I can do all that myself.) But mostly I want to read about people with complicated feelings and relationships. 

Grade: A

originally posted 2007