When You Dare by Lori Foster

When You Dare is the first book in the Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor series and my introduction to Lori Foster’s writing. 

The foundation of this story is one of the more heinous crimes imaginable - human trafficking, and the rescue of a group of females being held in Tijuana, Mexico. We don’t see the actual rescue, but pick up almost immediately afterwards when our hero, Dare Macintosh, has brought two of the victims, Alani and our heroine Molly, back into the United States. Dare hands Alani over to her brother, Trace, who is also a friend and business partner of Dare’s, and the hero of the next book.   But Dare isn’t ready to part company with Molly, who he refers to as an unexpected “complication,”  because she isn’t safe until they can find out who was responsible for her kidnapping and why she was target.  The bulk of the book is devoted to solving this mystery and while it was interesting and sometimes exciting, what I would have liked was to have actually been there for the rescue, rather than just hearing about it after the fact. Romantic Suspense is one of my favorite genres, and I’ve read some amazing books recently, so maybe that’s why When You Dare didn’t quite WOW me in the action/adventure department as much as I had hoped it would. Overall it was an entertaining read, but I felt that the actual suspense was lacking.

Dare was what I typically expect in an alpha hero. He’s a take charge kind of guy, wanting to protect the female, but at the same time wanting to get in her pants! He was sexy as hell and he had that whole “to do her or not to do her” internal struggle going on, and that made for some great sexual tension.

Molly wasn’t my ideal type of heroine. For someone who had just gone through what she had, I would have expected her to have been more adversely affected by it, more traumatized than she was. Now, don’t get me wrong! I don’t mean I wanted a simpering, weak female who couldn’t event take herself to the bathroom, but for a good deal of the book she was almost as alpha as Dare was, and that’s just not my cuppa when it comes to my romantic suspense heroines.

The bottom line – this is an entertaining, steamy story and a decent start to a new series!

This book was provided to me by netgalley.com, which had no bearing on my rating.