Author: M L Buchman

Review: Off the Leash by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Off the Leash by M.L. BuchmanOff the Leash (White House Protection Force #1) Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: White House Protection Force #1
Pages: 210
Published by Buchman Bookworks on January 26th 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

-White House Protection Force Romance #1-

The White House Protection Force Saves the Day! Come meet the behind-the-scenes specialists who keep our White House safe—even while they lose their hearts.

White House Chocolatier Clive Andrews takes pride in the subliminal messages hidden in his State Dinner showstoppers. But there’s more than sensual sweets at risk when his heart begins to melt.

Sergeant Linda Hamlin left the Army after a decade of service. As the newest member of the U.S. Secret Service K-9 Team she expected flak. She didn’t expect to be paired with a misfit mutt named Thor. Together they face down bombers, master spies, and a teenage genius.

All of which might be manageable, if not for the handsome chocolatier who teaches her that a little indulgence can be a very good thing.

My Review:

This was so much fun!

I don’t know what I was expecting when I opened this book, but whatever it was, I was absolutely charmed by the book itself. The opening scenes sucked me right in, where Sergeant Linda Hamlin meets her new dog, Thor, as part of her final exam for the Secret Service K-9 corps.

Linda was just honorably discharged from the Army Rangers K-9 unit after over a decade of very meritorious service. Now she’s a bit burned out and totally at loose ends.

Thor is not what she thought she needed, and neither is White House chocolate chef Clive Andrews.

First there’s poor little Thor. I know it’s difficult to attach the name “Thor” to something little, but this mutt seems to have gotten the name as a very bad joke. He’s a mish-mash of small terrier breeds, and not exactly the prettiest mix of them either. He looks like a purse dog, and he’s not much bigger – maybe 30 pounds. That’s not just small for a police dog, it’s downright tiny.

But he comes with one hell of a training pedigree, if not much of an actual one. Thor and Linda bond instantly, and pass the final exam course with flying colors – much to the chagrin of the exam proctor.

There’s nothing about Clive’s job as a White House chef that should have him watching Linda’s final exam. But when the mysterious Miss Watson, who occupies a hidden office in the White House sub-basement and seems to be on no known org chart whatsoever, says go here and do thus-and-such, people go there and do whatever she said. She “asked” Clive to watch Linda’s final test, so he does.

And he’s instantly captivated.

As Linda gets settled into her new duties as part of the White House Secret Service, she and Thor find themselves in the middle of a case that begins with diplomatic repercussions, but just gets weirder and weirder as it goes along.

It’s possible that two career Japanese diplomats are attempting to smuggle explosives into or near the White House – but that makes no sense whatsoever. And the more that Linda looks into the things that don’t fit about that puzzle, the stranger things seem.

When the likeliest, but oddest, conclusion is that someone is planning to disrupt a state dinner that brings Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian and Philippine diplomats to the table to discuss the real-life situation in the South China Sea, there’s still no clue as to why, who, or what the purpose of the disruption is.

It’s only when Linda, with a bit of help from Thor (and Clive) figures out the who that the why and the what become clear. And in the process, Linda, who has never really felt she belonged anywhere or with anyone, finally realizes that she’s come home.

Escape Rating A-: This was fun. In fact, it was way more fun that I was expecting, and I was certainly expecting good things. This is the second book I’ve received as a member of the M.L. Buchman Special Mission Review Team, and based on the two examples (the other was Big Sky, Loyal Heart) I’m really, really glad I’m in it.

(I received this book in exchange for an honest review. And honestly, I loved it!)

Big Sky, Loyal Heart turns out to be the precursor for Off the Leash and the entire White House Protection Force series, of which this is the first book. But many of Buchman’s series are loosely interconnected, from his first series, Night Stalkers, through Firehawks, Delta Force and Henderson’s Ranch, among others. You don’t have to read them all to enjoy any one of them, but they are all terrific.

There are two plot threads going on in Off the Leash. One is the case that Linda finds herself in the middle of, and the other is her unexpected romance with Clive. Well, it’s certainly unexpected to her, if not to the reader after their first meeting.

While I want to say the romance is a bit of “opposites attract” the more I think about it, the less that feels right. Their careers are certainly nothing alike. Linda has gone from the military to the Secret Service, so effectively into yet another protective role that involves a lot of potential danger. Clive’s career is a totally peacetime operation – he’s a chef! But both of them are driven to be the best at what they do, and both of their jobs, in very different ways, are high pressure, high stress and frequently all consuming. They have similar perspectives on their work, even if the work is very different.

They also have entirely different feelings about love and family and well, feelings. While Clive has not exactly been looking for Ms. Right when he meets Linda, he is very aware that love exists and that families are built upon that foundation. Linda, on the other hand, was a poor little rich girl with a nightmare of a family, and is certain that love is merely a hormonal imbalance that will right itself with time. Their differing beliefs on love and even its existence become the shoals on which their relationship nearly crashes and burns.

The case feels just a bit made-for-television. It was a lot of fun to watch Linda figure it all out, but the resolution was just a bit over the top. We don’t really see enough of the villain or his motivations for the crime to make sense in context. Which didn’t make it any less interesting seeing the whole thing come together.

One final note. That secondary character, Miss Watson, absolutely fascinates me. A long time ago, when I read the author’s first book, The Night is Mine, I said then that the story reminded me of some of the best Jack/Sam fanfiction from Stargate SG-1. Miss Watson, on the other hand, reminds me very much of the inimitable character of Henrietta “Hetty” Lange, the mysterious operations manager in NCIS: Los Angeles. Making the character of Miss Watson tall with her hair in a bun feels like the cosmetic equivalent of filing off the serial number. This is a character I am really looking forward to seeing a whole lot more of. She’ll never be the focus of one of the romances, except possibly in flashback, but she certainly is the proverbial mystery wrapped in an enigma, and I’d love to know more.

I’m also definitely looking forward to seeing more of this series. Off the Leash was both a heartfelt romance and a page-turning bit of romantic suspense. And Thor is a scene-stealer at every turn. I can’t wait for more!

Review: Big Sky, Loyal Heart by M. L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Review: Big Sky, Loyal Heart by M. L. BuchmanBig Sky, Loyal Heart (Henderson's Ranch, #5) Format: eARC
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Henderson's Ranch #5
Pages: 256
Published by Buchman Bookworks on November 30th 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

-a Henderson Ranch Big Sky romance-

Major Emily Beale struggles to excel in her new role as both mother and wife.

Colonel Michael Gibson’s career reaches a crisis, not that he’s talking about it.

Trainee military war dog Rip naps—he was named for Rip van Winkle, after all—while awaiting inspiration.

Film student turned cowboy Patrick Gallagher just keeps riding through life...until the woman of his dreams threatens to ride off into the sunset without him.

Recently retired war dog handler for Delta Force, Lauren Foster sets herself a simple mission: forget about the Army, get back to New York City, and try to be a civilian.

But first, Lauren must escape Montana before she gets caught by the Big Sky and a loyal heart.

My Review:

Big Sky, Loyal Heart may be the fifth book in the author’s Henderson’s Ranch series, but it calls all the way back to the first book of this author’s that I ever read, The Night is Mine, all the way back in 2012.

Not that one has to have read the entire oeuvre, or even all of the Henderson’s Ranch series to really fall in love with this one, but a little background might help.

As the long, overarching story stands in 2017, Mark Henderson and Emily Beale, the hero and heroine of the military suspense romance The Night is Mine, have moved on, not merely to the second chapter in their lives, but actually the third. In their second chapter, they flew firefighting hotshot crews to wherever the fires were hottest (and conducted a few secret quasi-military operations on the side) in the Firehawks series.

After that chapter, they have moved back to Mark’s family ranch in Montana, where they provide cabins, horses, and guides for guests, as well as jobs for some of their fellow special operations veterans.

Big Sky, Loyal Heart is all about one of those veterans, and the cowboy she falls for. Right after he falls into a mud puddle.

Lauren Foster has mustered out of Delta after 15 years. She left with a dog-sized hole in her heart that she doesn’t know if she can ever fill, a humvee-sized load of guilt and whole lot of confusion.

Jupiter was killed by enemy action. But it was action that he should never have been in. The order was wrong. Lauren knew it. Even the dog knew it. But Lauren followed orders, and Jupiter followed orders and now he’s dead. And Lauren has had enough.

But as she stands on the tarmac at Ft. Bragg with no clear direction for her return to civilian status, Colonel Michael Gibson swoops her up and tells her to follow him. He was her commanding officer in Delta, so she follows in his wake, all the way to Montana and Henderson’s Ranch.

She has no idea why she’s there. She has no idea why Gibson is there. And less than no idea why he brought her with him.

Lauren Foster expects to go home to New York City and surf her brother’s couch until she figures out what her civilian life is supposed to be.

It turns out that she’s already found it. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Escape Rating A-: This is just a terrific romance. I loved every minute of it, as I have pretty much everything I’ve ever read by this author, starting with The Night is Mine all those years ago.

This story rides on the backs of its two leads, Lauren Foster and her film student turned cowboy, Patrick Gallagher. While they both hail from New York City, they have found their respective ways to Montana by completely different roads.

Lauren is fascinating because she is one of this author’s trademark military women. She’s tough and strong and has spent years not showing weakness, trying to make everyone around her lose as much sight as possible of the fact that she’s female. She’s had to be “one of the boys” to earn the respect she’s needed to do her job, and it’s never been easy.

And yet she’s never a caricature or the stock character of the”strong heroine” that so often appears these days. She has her weaknesses and her flaws, she’s just used to hiding them. And she’s properly confused about why she’s at the Ranch and what she’s supposed to do with her suddenly open future.

Patrick is, in many ways, her opposite. He’s certainly her perfect foil. Where Lauren has been forced to tamp down all of her emotions, Patrick is charming and wears his heart on his sleeve for all to see. He also has a strong whimsical side. His background in film makes him see life, even his own life, as a movie, and he’s usually been cast as the comic sidekick in his own life. When Lauren drops into Montana, the ranch, and his heart, he has the chance to play the romantic hero, if he can just find a way to make the role fit for him.

Part of what makes this story, and so many of this author’s romances, work so well is that while Patrick is not anything like a ‘beta-hero’ he recognizes that Lauren is going to be the ‘alpha’ in their relationship – and he’s fine with that. There aren’t nearly enough heroines like Lauren, nor are there nearly enough heroes like Patrick. A romance where a strong woman finds a man who loves and respects her exactly as she is always appeals to this reader.

Although I have not read any of the previous books in the Henderson’s Ranch series, I have read most of the Night Stalkers and Firehawks books that came before it. It is marvelous to continue following Mark and Emily through their lives as they transition (more or less) from being elite soldiers to a still very active, but different, civilian life. And it was interesting to see Colonel Gibson, a background character throughout the Night Stalkers series and the hero of Bring on the Dusk, start changing directions in his life.

It’s always good to visit old friends.

Even if you haven’t dipped into the previous series (but do, they are all awesome) Big Sky, Loyal Heart is a lovely contemporary romance all on its own, and is complete in itself. But it will give you a yen to read the backgrounds of the marvelous crew that you will meet within its pages.

For those of us who have followed Mark and Emily through multiple series, there’s a hint at the end of Big Sky, Loyal Heart that their saga not only continues but moves into a new phase. I can hardly wait!

Review: Wild Justice by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Wild Justice by M.L. BuchmanWild Justice (Delta Force #3) Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Delta Force #3
Pages: 313
on October 17th 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

DELTA FORCE
The best counter-terrorism force on the planet.

SERGEANT DUANE JENKINS
• Elite Delta operator—explosives just make him grin •

AGENT SOFIA FORTEZA
• Top Intel Analyst for The Activity—thinks data is sexy•

The team must face their toughest mission yet: take down a massive human-trafficking ring and a corrupt Venezuelan spy agency—without leaving a trace.

Sofia and Duane.
In common: black sheep of extremely wealthy families, renegades against the status quo.
Differences: tactician vs. explosives expert, thinker vs. pure warrior.

Together: fight to keep their team alive, and their love.

My Review:

Wild Justice is a story with layers, like an onion. And also like an onion, some of those layers will make the reader at least sniffle a bit.

Like all of the Delta Force series, this is a story of a crack military team ghosting into someplace where angels fear to tread and governments fear to leave official footprints. Members of “the Unit” go in, they get the job done, and they were never there.

The series, which began with Target Engaged, is about one particular team of Delta operators. Not that they call themselves that. To its members, Delta is just “the Unit”, and they are the best of the best.

As this case begins, they are joined by an intelligence analyst from an equally elite but completely different U.S. Black Ops agency, one known only as “the Activity”.

Sofia Forteza has called in an operational unit to help her take down a Venezuelan military officer who is a local kingpin in the human trafficking cesspool. She’s found her dirtbag, she just needs help with the extraction as well as the rescue of the women and children he is currently holding.

What she gets is Duane Jenkins, nicknamed, of course, The Rock. He may not quite match up to the actor, but he gets damn close. Even more important, when he brings in the rest of his team, he trusts Sofia to have his back, and gives her just enough pointers to help her help him without ever insulting her capabilities or her intelligence.

And he helps her come down from her first field kill without thinking or acting as if she’s weak for any reason whatsoever.

Duane gives her respect, and Sofia is forced to admit that he’s the first man she hasn’t had to prove herself to, over and over and over, even within the top ranks of the elite units – or within her own family.

There’s something between them from the moment they meet, and it’s something that neither of them has ever experienced before. They are fortunate that their coinciding missions give them the chance to explore what it might be.

Even if neither of them believes that love is remotely possible. Not for who they are now, and not for what they came from. But just because neither Sofia nor Duane believes in love, that does not mean that it does not believe in them.

Escape Rating B+: Any reader who loves military romance should pick up the first book in M.L. Buchman’s series of interconnected books, The Night is Mine, and just binge. He starts with an elite SOAR unit, branches some of them off into an elite civilian wildfire fighting operation, and then links others to Delta Force. You don’t have to read all of them to get the sense of any individual book in the series, including this one, but they are all tremendously fun.

And Buchman has a gift for making sure that his female protagonists are every single bit the kick-ass warriors that his male protagonists are. And as they should be under the circumstances. But it’s not something that we see nearly enough.

Wild Justice operates on multiple layers. A big part of the story is the operations that the team takes on to help dent the human trafficking trade in South America. This part of the story is based on very real and very harrowing events. The civilian team they partner with is based on a real organization that works similarly to the way their fictional counterparts are portrayed.

In the middle of the operation, there’s also a romance. Of course there is. Unusual for this series, though, Sofia and Duane are both from similar backgrounds, both, in their own ways “poor little rich kids” who grew up with all the monetary advantages in the world but not much in the way of nurturing or moral support. Sofia had one person who had her back, her grandmother, the powerful owner of a premier wine-making company. However, she also had not merely a narcissistic and nasty mother, but also an abusive older brother.

Duane’s dad is a Coca-Cola executive, his mother is a high-powered attorney, and Duane is a disappointment to both of them. He chose to join the military to try to fix at least a few of the things that can’t be fixed with “a Coke and a smile.” They’ve never forgiven him, not that they ever gave much of a damn about him in the first place.

That both of them grew up as part of the 1% and chose a career in service to make a difference gives them something in common. It also means that Duane is not over-awed by the wealth of Sofia’s family’s winemaking empire – an empire that Sofia will someday inherit.

Although the course of true love never does run smooth, these are two people who plausibly have a chance, and also plausibly have a rocky road ahead of them. It works.

One final note. In the midst of the current #MeToo campaign, one scene early in the book had a tremendous amount of resonance. As part of a training mission, Duane and his Delta team, along with Sofia, take down a cruise ship being “held” by a Black Ops team from another agency. After the operation is over, Duane and Sofia overhear the “losing” team indulging in what is often dismissed as “locker room talk”. They are evaluating the women on the Delta team, including Sofia, by their physical attributes and discussing just how much they want to “punish” the women for beating them. It’s not just disgusting, it’s actual rape talk. Sofia wants to dismiss it. She’s fought this battle all of her life, and it never ends well for her. Her response is one that so many of us often make, that it’s only talk. That it doesn’t really matter. Or most tellingly, that it can’t be fixed.

What makes the scene stand out is the way that the Delta team does indeed “fix” it. As a unit. This is not something they will tolerate, not the men in the unit, and not the women. It’s a joint effort to make these assholes pay.

The physical payback meted out is relatively minor, but the response from the higher ups is stellar. Instead of dismissing the complaint, as we so often fear will happen, because it so often does happen, the perpetrators are punished severely with loss of jobs, loss of promotions, loss of assignments, retraining, black marks in their files. The authorities do what they are supposed to do, and what we always hope they do but frequently don’t. At the same time, there’s the very real world acknowledgement that the worst offenders will go out and offend somewhere else. The powers that be in both agencies can drum these bastards out, and get the word out to all their reputable contacts not to hire them. Which means that, unfortunately but all too likely, the less reputable outfits will hire them. But they have done everything they can reasonably do to pull the rotten apples out of their own barrel.

And that’s still a big win.

Review: Heart Strike by M.L. Buchman + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: Heart Strike by M.L. Buchman + GiveawayHeart Strike (Delta Force #2) Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Delta Force #2
Pages: 384
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on August 2nd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Richie Goldman is the team geek of Delta Force, a warrior and a technical wizard-but nothing is more mysterious to him than women. When a feisty new recruit joins the team just in time for a dangerous mission in the Colombian jungle, he'll have to make it out alive if he ever wants to figure her out.
Melissa Moore is going to be the best woman in Delta Force. Ready to do battle, her biggest challenge is avoiding Richie's sweet and sexy distractions. She was prepared for combat, but falling in love is an entirely different battlefield…

My Review:

target engaged by ml buchmanHeart Strike continues the Delta Force series begun in Target Engaged, and just like the first book in the series, it makes for a pulse pounding military romance from beginning to end.

In Target Engaged, we saw both the formation of an elite squad within Delta Force, and the hot as fire relationship between team leader Kyle Reeves and one of the members of his team, the first woman in Delta, Carla Anderson. By the time the story ends, Kyle and Carla are in a solid relationship, and the team that formed around them in training has become the premier Delta team in South America.

But this wouldn’t be a romance if the other three men on the team didn’t get their chance at an HEA, now that Carla is taken.

And that’s where Melissa Moore comes in. Carla was the first woman to pass Delta training, but she won’t be the last. Melissa is second, and there are days when it feels like her entire training consists of following in Carla’s footsteps and not quite measuring up. Not that Melissa doesn’t measure up to Delta, but that Carla seems to have set a mark that only perfection could possibly match.

Melissa is good, but she is far from perfect. And part of her feeling that she isn’t quite everything Carla is boils down to Melissa not quite figuring out what she specializes at. She very, very good at so many of the skills that Delta operators, need, without being an expert in any one of them. It’s hard for her to see that generalization is itself a skill.

Colonel Michael Gibson, the highest ranking field officer in Delta, sends Melissa to join Kyle and Carla’s group in Colombia. Generalist Melissa immediately hits it off with the squads ultimate specialist, Richie Goldman. Richie is the unit’s chief geek and technical wizard. Everyone calls him “Q” after James Bond’s gizmomaster. And just like “Q” in the Bond world, Richie is more than a bit tongue-tied around women. At least until Melissa lets her own nerd flag fly.

They get each other, at a level that goes beyond sense. But one member of the team believes that Melissa is not what she claims to be, or that her motives are less than pure, or that Richie is her victim and not the man she hasn’t known she’s been looking for all of her life.

So as the team pursues dangerous drug kingpins in the depths of the Colombian jungle, the team has to sort out where, whether and if they all belong. Before they tear each other apart.

Escape Rating B: I love this series almost as much as The Night Stalkers series it spawned from. One of the terrific things about both sets is that this is military romance where the women are every bit as much soldiers as the men. No one is weak, no one needs to be rescued. It’s all about joining strength to strength. And that’s awesome.

One of the things that is similar in both series is the intense team-building. These people all have to rely on each other in every extreme. Guarding each other’s backs is the only chance any of them have of making it out of each mission alive.

On the one hand, the way that Chad distrusts and disrespects Melissa from the get-go shows just how much of a problem it is when that mutual trust is breached. On my other hand, his reasons for his extreme reaction didn’t quite fit for this reader. As deep and strong as his instant antipathy was, and as many problems as it caused within the group, the reasons that were given for it, and the sudden reversal, didn’t quite gel. I was expecting some of the motives for his unreasonable reaction to be personal, and when that personal connection wasn’t there, his behavior didn’t make much sense.

On my third hand (consider me an alien) the relationship between Richie and Melissa was smoking hot from the instant they met. Just as with Kyle and Carla in Target Engaged, their problem was resisting the attraction long enough to build an emotional connection before the physical, and also to find a safe and private place.

They do have some of the worst, and funniest luck!

But if you love military romance, this series in particular, and M.L. Buchman’s books in general, are always bullseye shots to the heart..

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Sourcebooks is giving away 10 copies of the first book in the Delta Force series, Target Engaged, to entrants on this tour!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: Flash of Fire by M.L. Buchman + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> Book Giveaway> book reviews> Giveaways
Flash of Fire Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Firehawks #7
Pages: 352
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on May 3rd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The elite firefighters of Mount Hood Aviation fly into places even the CIA can't penetrate.
FROM WILDFIRE TO GUNFIRE When former Army National Guard helicopter pilot Robin Harrow joins Mount Hood Aviation, she expect to fight fires for only one season. Instead, she finds herself getting deeply entrenched with one of the most elite firefighting teams in the world. And that's before they send her on a mission that's seriously top secret, with a flight partner who's seriously hot.
Mickey Hamilton loves flying, firefighting, and women, in that order. But when Robin Harrow roars across his radar, his priorities go out the window. On a critical mission deep in enemy territory, their past burns away and they must face each other. Their one shot at a future demands that they first survive the present-together.
"A richly detailed and pulse-pounding read...tender romance flawlessly blended with heart-stopping life-or-death scenes." -RT Book Reviews, 4 1/2 stars for Full Blaze

My Review:

Whatever was in the water at SOAR seems to also be in the water at Mount Hood Aviation. Everyone who shows up to fly to fire ends up very happily married. And it’s wonderful fun!

Like so many of the books in Buchman’s Firehawks series, the story follows a particular pattern. What makes things interesting is always the characters, both the ones that series readers are familiar with, and the new ones who are introduced or at least focused on in the current entry.

In the case of Flash of Fire, our hero Mickey Hamilton is one of the pilots who has been with MHA for a while, but hasn’t had his own story because he’s been waiting for the right heroine to arrive.

The heroine for Mickey is Robin Harrow. She’s former Army National Guard, and currently serving as a reluctant waitress in the biggest independent truck stop in Arizona. But working at Phoebe’s Truck Stop is a family tradition – her mother did it, and now runs the place. Her grandmother is Phoebe herself. As far as fathers and grandfathers go, they aren’t in the picture. Harrow women don’t have husbands, they have sperm donors.

Someday, Phoebe figures that she will follow the family tradition. But right now, she’s flying lead for Mount Hood Aviation for one glorious season, because Emily Beale is much, much too pregnant to fit in even a helicopter’s cockpit. And Emily sees something in Robin that makes her believe Robin is the right pilot to take her place.

Robin initially sees Mickey as her extra-curricular fun for the summer, for what little downtime MHA seems to get. Mickey discovers that Robin is the only woman he will ever want, and is thunderstruck when she rejects his love, but is still more than willing to share his bedroll, tent, or bunk, as long as there are no strings attached.

Everyone who sees them knows that whatever they have is for the long haul – if Mickey can just muster the patience to let the reluctant Robin figure it out for herself.

And if they can survive not just the dangerous fire season, but also one of MHA’s mysterious Black Ops missions in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Escape Rating B+: While the regular firefighting is always interesting, it’s the crazy Black Ops missions that send these books into the stratosphere of nail-biting tension. As much as I enjoyed this story, it took a little longer than usual for the insane part of the fun to really begin.

Once they take off for parts nearly unknown, across the DMZ in North Korea, the action in this book ramps up to a thrill a minute.

pure heat by ml buchmanFor those new to the series who don’t want to start with either Pure Heat, the first Firehawks book, or The Night is Mine, where Emily Beale and Mark Henderson’s story really begins in the Night Stalkers, Flash of Fire is a great place to pick up the series.

Because Robin is a complete outsider to both MHA and the folks who came over or drop in from SOAR, everyone has to get introduced to her, and she has to learn everyone’s place in this high-adrenaline “family of choice”. For new readers, her introduction is their introduction. For those who have followed the series, it’s a nice refresher. At something like 20 books in for the combined series, the cast is getting pretty large. It’s always nice to see how everyone is doing.

In general, Robin makes a very interesting heroine to follow. She’s the best of the best, but she always thinks she still has so much to learn. While everyone around her at MHA is better at one thing or another than she is, Robin is excellent at pulling all those things together and creating coherence. She makes good decisions fast, which is a talent desperately needed when flying to fire, because the fire moves and changes quicker than an eye blink.

At the same time, she’s always living in the moment. She signs on to MHA for a one season contract, not because she doesn’t want more, but because that’s all they need. Emily Beale won’t be pregnant forever, however much it may seem like it by the start of her third trimester. So Robin believes that she and Mickey can only have one season, and that it is stupid to get involved when she knows she has to leave, while MHA is his home.

Not that Robin doesn’t think emotional involvement isn’t inherently just a bit stupid, and not that her family history doesn’t make her believe that it won’t work for her. Her personal history also contributes. Men want to challenge the strong soldier woman, or they want to break her. They don’t fall in love with her, and often don’t even like her very much.

Mickey is something Robin hasn’t encountered before. A man who likes her and is interested in her just the way she is. It’s the one thing she can’t resist, even if it takes her an entire exhausting fire season to finally see the light. That Robin finds not just a man who loves her, but also women who accept her as one of their own, is a marvelous touch. Flash of Fire easily passes the Bechdel Test, as Robin and the women of MHA bond not just over the men in their lives, but the risks they shared as fellow soldiers, and the dangers and rewards of flying to fire.

Like all of the books in both the Night Stalkers and Firehawks series, what makes the story work is that Robin and Mickey are equals in every possible way. Equally strong, equally intelligent, equally excellent at what they do and sometimes equally stubborn. I always love romances where the hero and the heroine are perfectly capable of rescuing each other – and where they both acknowledge it.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

M.L. Buchman and Sourcebooks are giving away 5 copies of the first book in the Firehawks series, Pure Heat, to lucky entrants on this tour.

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Review: By Break of Day by M.L. Buchman + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: By Break of Day by M.L. Buchman + GiveawayBy Break of Day (The Night Stalkers, #15) Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Night Stalkers #7
Pages: 384
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on February 2nd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Captain Kara Moretti flies high in her MQ-1C Gray Eagle UAV. It is the Night Stalkers' eyes and ears in the sky, and being behind a remote control and one step back from the action has always worked for her… and her love life.
Right until Captain Justin Roberts walks straight through her shields and into her heart. Justin is a pilot who loves being right in the middle of the fray. Together they'll go where life, limb, and heart are at risk in the Mongolian wilderness. But Justin learns there's something more important than missions - Kara.

My Review:

night is mine by ml buchmanI didn’t quite stay up until break of day to finish this book, but it was close. I’ve enjoyed every single book in Buchman’s Night Stalkers series, starting with The Night Is Mine, reviewed here four(!) years ago.

And one of the best parts of this series is that it has become real in those four years. At the time that The Night is Mine was published, heroine and decorated chopper pilot Emily Beale of SOAR was aspirational and inspirational, but not possible. Now she and her sisters-in-SOAR are still inspirational, but are an achievable goal. All combat positions, including SOAR, have been opened to women. Readers no longer have to check their reality-meters at the door to fall for this series.

For those who love military romance, the Night Stalkers are consistent winners.

In this seventh full-length entry into the series (it’s the 15th story overall, but half are novellas or shorter) we have two new Captains in the Night Stalkers. Captain Kara Moretti is the Night Stalkers first drone pilot, and Justin Roberts pilots the biggest bird that the Night Stalkers fly.

At the beginning of the book, Kara is also conducting her first mission as the unit’s new Air Mission Commander. It’s a daunting job, made even more pressure-filled if she pauses to think about her predecessors in that job; the legendary Mark Henderson (story in The Night is Mine) and his equally impressive successor, Lieutenant Archie Stevenson (story in I Own the Dawn), now both retired and fire fighting in Oregon.

i own the dawn by ml buchmanBut Kara’s first foray as AMC, a testing and training run for the U.S. Turkish allies, is a success, and cements her new position. It is also the first time we see Kara get into the heads of all of her pilots as well as deducing the “enemy’s” traps with seconds to spare.

And after the mission, we see the progress of Captain Justin Roberts low, slow and sometimes confused pursuit of Kara Moretti finally trip him up and flare into life.

These are two people who probably wouldn’t have met outside of SOAR. Moretti is Brooklyn born and raised, and her Italian-American family owns a neighborhood Italian grocery and pasta shop. Everyone not working the store is a cop.

Roberts is from the other end of the country, and the other end of everything. He’s Texas through-and-through, to the point of wearing a cowboy hat whenever he doesn’t need his helmet on. His family owns ranches, including the best Quarter Horse breeding ranch in the country. In spite of his cowboy manners, Justin is from old money, and lots of it. He just doesn’t throw it around.

Roberts and Moretti bond over a black-in-black operation in the Israeli desert. At first, it seems as if their mission was a complete success. Until everyone involved in that mission; Colonel Michael Gibson of Delta, the high-level Army Intelligence unit they extracted, and the even higher-level pain-in-the-ass and button-pusher who ordered that mission all show up back in their lives with the news that enemy agents have infiltrated both the top-secret Israeli base and the American Army unit posted alongside them. It’s up to Kara to command a mission to take care of all the leaks, even as she doesn’t want to think about exactly what plugging those leaks means.

Until it all goes completely pear-shaped, and Kara is forced to shoot down Justin’s chopper as he seemingly goes rogue. She figures out exactly what he means to her, as she makes the call that blows his bird out of the sky.

Escape Rating B+: This series isn’t just good, it’s consistently good. When I pick one up, I know that I’ll be treated to a sweet/hot romance, a hero and heroine who are equals in everything, an immersion into a military family that I’ve grown to like and respect, and pulse-pounding action with guns blazing and lives on the line.

At the beginning of this story, the women of SOAR get together and let Kara know that her odds of not falling for Justin Roberts are just not in her favor. It’s a moment that shows the bond between all of these spectacular and spectacularly capable heroines. And it also lampshades the fact that every woman who joins their unit inevitably falls in love with one of the men either in or attached to SOAR. And that their marriages, unlike many military marriages, have chance of lasting because the rules for Special Operations are just a bit loose. These couples deploy together, not halfway around the world from each other. The requirements to get into this unit are just too stringent to force anyone out just because they married someone who understands what they do, because their spouse is just as highly qualified and mission critical as they are.

Perhaps this is barely plausible, but it is absolutely marvelous just the same.

Like so many of the heroes and heroines in this series, neither Kara nor Justin has led a charmed life, in spite of the relatively happy families they both come from. Kara reflects her experience as a woman in the military – she is constantly looking out for someone to treat her as a sex-object instead of an officer. She’s happy that the incidences of such treatment are much fewer and farther between in SOAR than anywhere she has served.

She’s also conscious that while the unit treats her as a pilot, in fact she doesn’t put herself in harm’s way the way the others do. Her remote controlled birds are crucial to the operations of their missions, but her own life is safely back at base on the U.S.S. Peleliu while those missions are conducted. And Kara always has her guard up, because as much as her family loves her, they are always trying to shove her back into the expected box, and she resists and resents it, even though she loves them.

Justin lost a helicopter and his entire crew to a terrorist who threw high explosives into the bird in a supposedly safe location. Everyone except Justin died, and his back is a mass of burns and scar tissue. He’s lost his sense of inviolability, and he still mourns the men and women he lost every day.

So these two wounded people find each other, fall in love, and learn about each other after the fact, then have to figure out whether it’s just a fling or if they have a future. When it seems like that future may have ended before it begins, the reader’s heart breaks with Kara’s, even though one is almost positive that it can’t end that way. And it doesn’t.

Finding out who the real villain is behind all this mess, and watching him get his just desserts, was the icing on a very tasty cake.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Sourcebooks is giving away a Night Stalkers book bundle to one lucky entrant on this tour!

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Review: Target Engaged by M.L. Buchman + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | blog tours> book reviews> Excerpts> Giveaways
Review: Target Engaged by M.L. Buchman + GiveawayTarget Engaged (Delta Force, #1) Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Delta Force #1
Pages: 384
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on December 1st 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Kyle Reeves was trained by his father to do one thing: be the very best. So he isn't daunted by the Delta Force selection process—the toughest military training on earth—or when the very best woman falls into his arms.
Carla Anderson buried her heart in Arlington when she lost her mother and brother to combat. She wants nothing more than to give her all in the line of duty until she too is laid down beside them, and Delta training might just be the challenge she's looking for. Little did she know, the true challenge was coming in the shape of a sexy, alpha-male military operative.
Surviving brutal training is just the beginning of the merciless path to Delta, but it's also the dawn of the hottest passion Kyle and Carla have ever known…

My Review:

As I was reading this book, the U.S. Secretary of Defense announced on December 3, 2015 that starting in early 2016 all U.S. combat military positions will be open to women, including the Rangers, the SEALs, SOAR and Delta. So, while this book is certainly fiction, it looked forward at something that could happen in the near future.

Three women have already passed Army Ranger training, so that day may be much sooner than anyone thought just a few years ago.

Back to the present day, and the book…

bring on the dusk by ml buchmanTarget Engaged is the first book in the author’s Delta Force series, which is spin-off of his awesome Night Stalkers series. Colonel Michael Gibson of Delta Force was the hero of Bring on the Dusk (reviewed here) in the Night Stalkers series, and he serves as the main bridge between the two units. Not that there aren’t occasional appearances by other members of the Night Stalkers, but Gibson is the most obvious link.

He’s the one who makes the final judgment on whether these candidates for “the Unit” actually pass one of their more important final exams, even if that exam is only partially concealed within an interview. They are all training for Delta, they are supposed to see the wheel within the wheel within the wheel.

In this first book in the series, we’re introduced to a small group of Delta candidates who become a tight-knit force within their class. Although the focus is on Carla Anderson, who plans to be the first woman to make Delta, and Kyle Reeves, the natural leader of their contingent, the other guys come in for enough pages to make them interesting possible leads for future books in the series.

This is a story with two threads to one. One is the training of Delta. For those out there who love books where the hero or heroine goes through intensive training, there’s a lot here to love. All the members of “the Unit” are in training from the moment they arrive at the ass-end of Ft. Bragg until the day the survivors graduate – or flunk out at the last hurdle. Just over 100 start, only seven finish, and only five survive their final training. By survive I don’t mean some die, although many of the ones that fail the test wish they had. But out of the original cadre, only five go the distance. A few are sent back to their units with recommendations that they come back after either some additional training, or just after they heal their injuries, but most just fail.

Carla starts out as the only woman in the Delta recruiting class, and she’s the first woman to finish. The story is very real when it talks about how she makes it – not just that she goes through the exact same grueling training as the men, having to succeed or fail under the exact same standards, but they way that she also has to handle being the only woman, and the way that she has learned to cope with being one of the few women in what is still a man’s world.

But when they graduate, and the group is ready to set out on their first mission, Carla finally gives in to the steaming attraction that she feels for fellow Delta operator Kyle Reeves, and it is here that she breaks pattern. From this point on in the story we have some kick-ass military romance, as Carla and Kyle explore what they can be to each other, as well as how they and their relationship fit into the team that Kyle has built and Delta has honed.

When their first missions put them each in danger of losing their lives, they both have to face what it means to be in love with someone who risks their life every single day, and who you might have to deliberately send in harm’s way for the greater good.

Escape Rating B+: I loved both halves of this story – the training half and the mission half, but they are completely different.

During the entire training component, both Kyle and Carla are extremely aware of the heat they generate together, and they do absolutely nothing about it. A relationship between them while they are in the initial training/weeding out process will send them both back to their previous units, and probably scuttle Carla’s entire career. Also any relationship would be a distraction that they have neither the time, the energy or the privacy for until the initial phase of training is over.

Also, it’s not just that neither of them has much experience at real relationships, but that Carla specifically has no plans to ever be in a real relationship. A lot of the later tension between Carla and Kyle is that she had no plans to ever love anyone again, and is completely unwilling to admit that she loves Kyle and isn’t ready to go on without him.

One of the things I found slightly jarring about this story is that I couldn’t realistically see how a woman who is portrayed the way that Carla is would fall into a relationship with someone in her unit. While it isn’t against regulations – they are both the same rank and not officially in a reporting relationship – there is always a danger that the woman in any such relationship will be considered less capable simply because of the relationship. And if it fails, she’s the one who will lose rank or status, not him.

On that other hand, once I let go of my disbelief, the missions they went on were page-turning gut twisters from beginning to end. They go after bad guys who really need to be brought down, and they finish them off with style. Their second mission had me on the edge of my seat, and I loved watching them figure out how to save themselves and each other with not much more than grit, determination and a little help from some friends in the CIA and Mossad.

In the end, Target Engaged reminded me a bit of The Night is Mine (reviewed here), the first book in the Night Stalkers series. Night reads more than a bit like Stargate fanfiction, and Target Engaged has the undercover agent vibe of some NCIS fanfic. I love them all.

~~~~~~ EXCERPT ~~~~~~

If you have been appropriately intrigued by my review, Sourcebooks has a treat for you. The first six chapters of Target Engaged are available as a free sampler. To get started with Delta Force, just click on the link at the end:

Dear Reader,
Welcome to my newest series: the first women of Delta Force. I can’t begin to tell you how much fun this was to write.
Most of us know little more about Delta Force than the Chuck Norris movies (which leave a lot to be desired) or perhaps we only know the name. In researching my Night Stalkers series, I kept running into these guys. They are the elite of Special Operations Forces. They are at a level of SEAL Team 6, and most would argue they were even beyond that. They are the ghost and shadow warriors who helped take down drug lord Pablo Escobar, capture Noriega, were undoubtedly behind the locating of Saddam Hussein, and are the main reason that Al-Qaeda abruptly stopped being a topic in the Iraq War when over three thousand of their leaders were swept off the board.
Yet the Pentagon states that they don’t exist. Fascinating.
And while they often work with undercover female operatives, no woman has yet managed to kick in the front door on one of the most arduous selection programs in the military.
I decided to change that.
Carla Anderson stepped forward to take the challenge. She is a not a woman out to prove she can match any man, she’s out to prove that she can beat them at their own game. And that was the first thing that I loved about writing this series.
In the Night Stalkers, the women were strong, excellent, and determined.
To be a Delta Force woman, Carla had to add enough attitude and drive to plow through all obstacles which just made her so much fun. Nothing was off the table when it came to her attitude or her actions.
And that was the second thing I came to love about this series launcher, Target Engaged. Being Delta Force, they really do operate outside so many bounds. They are sent to do the tasks that no one else can. To that I added the additional challenge that Robert Ludlum gave to Jason Bourne (though I’m quoting the movie): “I don’t send you to kill. I send you to be invisible. I send you because you don’t exist.” I’m pretty convinced that this is part of Delta’s mission.
It is occasionally said by retired Delta Force operators (as the on-duty ones never speak): “If we’d been sent in to take down bin Laden, you still wouldn’t know how it was done.” To bring that to life gave me a permission as a writer to run my characters into hard and strange places and be just a little gonzo doing it.
But writing is a give and take, and I can’t begin to tell you how much the characters I created shaped my telling of this story. I like to think that they had as much fun as I did bringing this story to life.
I hope that you enjoy the reading even half as much as I enjoyed the writing!
M.L. Buchman (the Oregon Coast, November 2015)

Get to know the Carla, and the entire Delta Force team by reading the first SIX chapters of TARGET ENGAGED for free! Just click here to download them! To get you started, we’ve included the first few pages below:

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

The treats never end with any of M.L. Buchman’s books. Sourcebooks is giving away an M.L. Buchman book bundle to one lucky entrant on this tour!

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Review: Wildfire on the Skagit by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: Wildfire on the Skagit by M.L. BuchmanWildfire on the Skagit by M L Buchman
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Firehawks #5
Pages: 194
Published by Buchman Bookworks on June 19th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Smokejumper romance- Krista Thorson, No. 2 smokejumper with Mount Hood Aviation's elite team, parachutes into wildfires for a living. Too tall, too big, too strong, she never fit in...except on the fireline. Her past lost, her future uncertain, Krista fights for the present. Special Forces veteran Evan Greene jumps fire to avoid facing his past. Some memories are too painful. Evan's policy? Bury and move on... Until Krista unearths what he most wants to forget. No half-measures win this firefight. Together they must face their pasts before their love burns away in the Wildfire on the Skagit.

My Review:

Yesterday I had a fairly bad headache. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t want to read, but does mean I bounced off book after book, including some that I know I really want to read, just not right then. I’ve already caught up with Anna Hackett’s Hell Squad series, so I went hunting for another one of my auto-absorb authors. And that’s how we end up with Wildfire on the Skagit as today’s book, because M.L. Buchman is guaranteed to get me lost in a good story.

wildfire at larch creek by ml buchmanI will say that his numbering system for his series is starting to drive me a bit bonkers. I always end up wondering if I’ve missed an intervening book or two. Having read both Wildfire at Dawn (reviewed here) and Wildfire at Larch Creek (here) I don’t think I did.

This Smokejumpers trilogy within the Firehawks series features the people who jump as first stick for Mount Hood Aviation. MHA is the best of the best, which is exactly what you would expect from any company run by Majors Beale and Henderson from The Night is Mine (reviewed here) and the rest of Buchman’s Night Stalkers series.

But this trilogy features the smokejumpers of MHA, the people who jump out of perfectly performing aircraft in order to fight terrifyingly dangerous fires. The hero of Wildfire at Dawn, first stick Johnny “Akbar the Great”, is still with MHA after he found true love with a local wilderness guide. His former jumping partner, Tim Harada, is now fighting fires back home in Alaska, after the events of Wildfire at Larch Creek.

Which left Tim’s former position open at MHA for Krista Thorson, one of the few female smokejumpers. There are plenty of women firefighters and pilots at MHA, but few women become smokejumpers because the job requires a tremendous amount of upper body strength, which few women have. Krista is one of those few. Being taller and stronger than her classmates, male and female, in her small town high school caused her no end of grief and social ostracism back then. Now it’s an asset for her job, even if she still believes that most men want some little delicate flower instead of the Viking warrior that Krista so strongly resembles.

Evan Greene is still trying to burn through his demons by jumping fires. He comes to MHA after five years with the Montana Zulies because MHA never has a down season. During the Pacific Northwest’s wet winters, MHA flies to the southern hemisphere to jump fire in someone else’s hot season. After six years as a Green Beret, and five years as a smokejumper, Evan hasn’t figured out what to do with his downtime, so he’s found a way not to have any.

Both Evan and Krista have demons to face. Some of them are even the same demon – that fear of loving anyone and letting them rely on you because you won’t be there when they need you has bitten them both deep. And while Evan may not exactly have PTSD, he certainly has some dark and dangerous moods that keep anyone from getting too close to him.

Evan is afraid to feel, because he lost the one person who needed him the most. And Krista not only knows just what that feels like, but suffers from the added whammy that she can’t believe that any man will want her for the woman she is, and not some little doll who needs protection. None ever have, until Evan walks into her life and away with heart.

The only question is whether Evan is willing to let go of his pain and offer her his heart in return.

Escape Rating B: This is a hot and sweet romance with surprisingly little conflict between the main characters. And I would much rather see the struggle for a happy ever after to come out of issues that are organic to the characters rather than a misunderstandammit, so I liked the way this one worked.

wildfire at dawn by ml buchmanOne of the other things that I really,really love about all of Buchman’s series is that the romance is always between equals. Both parties are strong characters, and are often strong warriors of one kind or another as well. In the cases where there are differing careers, both are experts. There are no weak links, and especially no stories where the man is strong and driven and the woman is weak or inexperienced. These are all stories of grown-ass men and competent, mature women. Often as not, the women are more capable than the men, as was the case in the previous two books in this trilogy. Laura the wildlife guide in Wildfire at Dawn had a better handle on herself and her future than Johnny “Akbar”, who is great at what he does but seems to be putting the rest of his life on hold for as long as he can continue to jump smoke.

Krista is every bit the smokejumper that Evan is, and possibly a bit more. And he doesn’t need her to be weak in order to make himself feel strong. That she is a big, strong, muscular woman has given her a few relationship hangups, but then in our current society, any woman who does not meet the tall and waifish model ideal would end up battered about the edges of her self-confidence. We all have body issues, unfortunately.

The bond between Evan and Krista is that they both share a similar pain – the fear of getting close to someone and not being there when they are needed. It’s happened to both of them and left terrible scars. They help each other find strength in those broken places, and it’s marvelous.

One of the best parts of this story was the sequence with the Smokejumpers Camp that Krista has started. She brings in 20 girls from the local high school for a three-day wilderness experience of camping, hiking, living a bit off the forest, and training jumping and rock climbing. She’s giving back the experience that she didn’t have, that young women can do or be anything they set their minds to, and that their strength and skill is an asset and definitely not a liability. That Evan also sees her true purpose and is completely on board with it made them bond together marvelously.

And it’s a lesson we all need to be reminded of, no matter what our age. We can be anything we set our minds to.