Smoke Screen

It's muggy outside, certainly not the time to be gardening or working on home maintenance projects. However, once all the inside jobs are finished, it's the perfect weather for crashing on the couch with a new book. I enjoy reading TRNs because they are usually straight-forward stories, with good guys and bad guys, as well as romances that turn out well by the last page. An author I used to read, but abandoned when I thought her stories became too trite, too predictable, is Sandra Brown, a well-published author. When I saw a new title (Smoke Screen) on the shelf in the book aisle, I spent time previewing the story before I took it to the cash register, not wanting to spend money if the plot was the same old/same old.

The story is interesting, with drama dominating the telling, rather than hot sex (although where there are male characters, there is always incredible, hot sex, usually on the first or second date, because the men are always more than adequately endowed and superbly skillful at fulfilling any woman's most vivid sex fantasy!). There is a nice blend of characters, some predictable and some not, that interact in a engaging plot with believable conflict and an unexpected resolution.

The plot involves a fire at a police station that results in 4 police officers being hailed as heroes for the lives they save that day. There are also deaths, including victims who are trapped in locked cells engulfed by the fast-moving blaze. When a fire inspector investigates, he cannot get information about one of the victims, no matter how often he asks for it from his childhood friend, who is also one of the heroes. Before he can finish the investigation, he attends a party, gets drunk, and wakes up in bed with his sexual partner dead of an apparent overdose. The publicity hounds him out of a job and into the woods, where he lives in isolation in a small cabin. His only neighbor is Delno, who seldom wears a shirt, never bathes or washes his hair, and lives off the fat of the land.

Five years later, an incident occurs that takes him back in time, and he decides it is time to finish what he had been prevented from doing: closing the investigation into the deaths of the victims of the fire. Of course, first he has to kidnap a very attractive young female newswoman (with an incredible body) who was involved with his childhood friend, the hero, who dies while they are in bed ... .

Seriously, it's a good read! Okay, maybe not a "serious" good read, but the story is a notch above a typical TRN. There are interesting twists and turns in the plot, as well as budding romance. By the denouement, Raley is vindicated, but that's what I want in a Sunday read: predictability. Now, back to finishing the laundry (I lied when I said I had already finished my chores. I got so caught up in the story that I read instead.).