Deadly Past

Deadly Past by Kris Rafferty Secret Agents #3 Suspend belief and focus on the romance, maybe, and you might enjoy this book. I have to admit I almost put this book down in the first chapter because I could not understand why a trained FBI agent would do what Cynthia did when she found herself in a safe house with a headache and some loss of memory about the evening before. My thought was that she would immediately call her boss and get a team out to the safe house not...well...not what she did do. Next she heads home and there awaits Charlie. Now, she has a backstory with Charlie that includes a kiss that went wrong, the death of her brother who was Charlie’s best friend, a friendship for years that her team and his don’t know about...etc. This story seemed to jump from one unbelievable decision to the next and I kept scratching my head wondering what this luckless couple would do next. Neither of them seemed to be “smart” and that left me thinking that perhaps instead of a romantic suspense with FBI it might have been easier to understand if it had been a cozy mystery...maybe? Anyway…I did finish it and was still scratching my head… DID I ENJOY THIS BOOK? Not so much WOULD I READ ANOTHER BOOK BY THIS AUTHOR? I think so – I have liked some of her other books better than this one. DID I LIKE CHARLIE AND CYNTHIA? I didn’t relate to either of them so perhaps not COULD I SEE THE TWO IN THEIR HEA? Yes...they had history and the backstory. I just didn’t see her as an FBI profiler and him as a forensic pathologist...not as I have seen other characters do their jobs in similar genre books. Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington-Lyrical-Zebra for the ARC – This is my honest review. 2-3 Stars

Wow, just, wow - I loved this book. It's fast paced romantic suspense with a tightly woven plot that kept me guessing until the very end. I couldn't put this novel down and stayed up late into the night reading. Cynthia is an FBI agent and Charlie is a forensic pathologist that have a complicated past together, including the love each has for the other but refuses to acknowledge. When they are implicated in a horrific crime, their efforts to extricate themselves and protect each other leads to more complications with the potential for extreme penalties. I've enjoyed each book in the series and each book is better than the last. While this is a stand alone novel, the series is so good that you really owe it to yourself to read them all. The author is on my must read authors' list.