Review - 'Against the Edge' by Kat Martin

Review

In book 8 of the Raines of Wild Canyon series, Ben and Claire travel all over the country to find Ben’s missing son, Sam. Even though they’re attracted to each other, they keep saying they shouldn’t sleep together because they don’t want to fight or have the distraction of an affair, which could prohibit them in finding Sam. They do sleep together, however, and everything is fine between them, as I suspected. Aside from the missing child plot, there’s a drug subplot with Claire’s pushy ex-boyfriend. Claire doesn’t want him back but keeps giving him mixed signals.

Ben is pretty macho in the way he carries on with women and refuses to love. (The one woman he’d loved betrayed him years earlier, and he can’t move on and love again.) Don’t get me wrong, I like this kind of plot and it worked for the story, but I found it frustrating that he would give Claire a chance, then back-peddle and push her away, and she wouldn’t leave. That doesn’t sound like a strong female character to me even though Ben kept thinking she was. Their romance just didn’t seem real to me, and I didn’t understand why Claire moved from LA to Houston to be close to Ben without talking to him about what she wanted and needed from him since they were only having a fling.

Meeting the secondary characters (couples from the previous books in this series) were some of the better parts in this story.

This is the first novel I’ve read from Kat Martin, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about this series. While this was a good story with a good plot, I think it would’ve been better as a novella.

For a Harlequin book, I was surprised by the typos. Besides a few obvious misspellings, there were three instances when the wrong name was used in the sentence.

All in all, I liked the story, but it had potential to be better.

3 Stars