Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Beneath the Wall

Perky red-haired photo-journalists always seem to fall for tall, dark, handsome narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered Adonises who look like the covermen for Muscle and Fitness and have corded muscles that demand exploring. If you can get past that cliché and the 9 grammatical errors I marked in the first 150 pages this is a great read. Eryn LaPlant has that knack that some writers possess for drawing your interest from page one and holding it unbroken as you flip the pages. There are books one plows through to get past the tedious bits but this one carries you along non-stop and it does it without leading you through non-stop adventure though that’s there as well. Anyone who has read The Bridges of Madison County will recognize the central MacGuffin of adult children discovering after her death that their mother had a past they’d never dreamed of. Few though discover that their frumpy parent spent her salad days dodging bullets in Vietnam and fending off the attentions of Marines starved for female company.

Another cliché of the genre is the arresting cover shot of model Jason Aaron Baca calculated to grab the attention of casual browsers or book store window gazers. There’s even a forgettable book by him highlighting the fact that only 1 in 20,000 wannabes make it in his world. Fortunately the present tome rises above it all to provide book lovers with a very readable action-adventure romance.

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