Broken Falcon by Rachel Grant

Narrated by Greg Tremblay and Nicol Zanzarella

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to Broken Falcon – book twelve in Rachel Grant’s terrific Evidence series – for months. Ms. Grant is my favourite author of romantic suspense, and I’m always impressed by her ability to craft tense and exciting stories with clever plots and interesting, engaging characters. Also, this book’s hero, Chase Johnston, was an important secondary character in Incriminating Evidence, one of my series favourites – if you haven’t read or listened to it, I’d recommend doing so before this, as Chase’s backstory is incredibly important to this story (note – there are spoilers in this review) and given his role in that book, I was especially keen to find out what happened to him ‘after’ and for him to find love and get his own HEA.

When we catch up with Chase at the beginning of the book, we find out that he’s devoting much of his free time to preventing runaway teens from being sucked into a sex-trafficking ring. Together with Isabel Dawson, the wife of Senator – and Raptor boss – Alec Ravissant, Chase helps the teens to get to a shelter set up specially to help prevent them being sent back to abusive family situations. He’s fairly sure the trafficking ring is linked to a legitimate business, a cam-girl site called Cam Dames – although he hasn’t yet been able to find any evidence to tie the two together. On this particular evening, Chase has cut things a bit fine; it takes longer than he’d expected to persuade the girl he’s ‘intercepting’ to go into the next-door coffee shop to meet with Isabel, and she has only just gone inside when a couple of goons show up looking for their quarry. Chase is Raptor’s expert in unarmed combat (having learned martial arts from a very young age, he’s got Mad Ninja Skillz!) and it doesn’t take him long to run them off.

Later the same night, he’s called back to the coffee shop after a call alerts him to the presence of the same two thugs hammering on the door and demanding entry. By the time Chase and his fellow operative Tariq arrive, the men have gone, but they check the place out anyway – and Chase is stunned to recognise the woman at the counter as Desiree, the cam-girl he’s been ‘visiting’ online for the past few months.

Psychology grad student Eden O’Keefe has a part time job at the university as well as one at Vivace Coffee but doesn’t usually work at that particular branch; she stepped in to do a shift as a favour for a friend who was sick. But what with school fees, mortgage payments and set-up costs for her online business, she needs to earn more money than she can earn as a research assistant and barista. Heavily disguised to maintain anonymity, she works as a cam-girl; she’d started out working for Cam Dames, but decided to leave and set up on her own a while back. It’s going well; quite a few of her old clients followed her to keep her financially viable, she enjoys what she does and has no qualms about being a sex-worker. And why should she? She’s doing nothing illegal, and is providing a valuable service for some of her clients, men she suspects may have difficulty finding sexual fulfilment in other ways. Eden has no idea the hot young Raptor operative who enters the coffee shop is the client she knows as Falcon – but Chase certainly gets her motor running in a way nobody has for the last couple of years. She has a strict no-dating rule while she’s working as a cam-girl, knowing a boyfriend will likely not be happy with it, and while she does sometimes bring herself to orgasm with clients, she misses the physical closeness and intimacy of sex with a flesh and blood man. She’s highly attracted to Chase – but doesn’t expect to see him again.

Given what happened to him, Chase has had a tough time getting used to being ‘himself’ again. A couple of years earlier, he’d had a chip implanted in his brain as part of a secret experiment to develop an infrasound weapon; when used, the chip controlled his actions and turned him effectively into a sleeper agent within Raptor. Not only that, he was repeatedly raped by the woman who was heading up the experiments – his therapist Dr. Parks (who is now, thankfully, in prison.) Since the chip was removed a few months earlier, Chase has come to realise the extent to which it suppressed his emotions, and he sometimes struggles to process them or to feel anything – plus there are still holes in his memory, although those are gradually being filled. The sexual assaults have naturally had a profound effect, but ‘meeting’ Desiree online (and anonymously) has given him the confidence to start to reclaim his sexuality in a safe space. But now, recognising Eden is Desiree, the first woman to have made him feel anything other than numb for a long time, Chase is faced with a dilemma. It’s been over a month since he’s visited Desiree online and he had actually intended to stop, but seeing her – Eden – standing right in front of him… he can’t tell himself to stay away. He also can’t tell her who he is – not until he’s sure she’s not somehow involved with the traffickers.

The sex-trafficking plotline is woven skilfully through the story as Chase and Eden become closer and it becomes clear that there’s a lot more to the trafficking operation than Chase had at first believed. But while I’ve always admired the author’s ability to balance romance and plot, here, that balance is off. I’m often complaining that books in this genre are all plot and no romance, but while that isn’t the case here, I can’t say that the reverse is true either; the plot is certainly intriguing, but there’s not enough of it, and the pacing isn’t as tight as usual owing to a LOT of internalisation, sometimes in the middle of dialogue or action. And sad to say, I wasn’t convinced by the romance, because it felt as though most of the romantic development had taken place off page. Chase and Eden are halfway to being in love by the time we meet them, and I didn’t feel a great deal of chemistry between them. The book alsohas a heavier emphasis on sex than in Ms. Grant’s other novels, which, considering the heroine is a sex worker, isn’t a surprise, but the first half or so is dominated by sex scenes and they overpower any sense of emotional connection or romantic development. There’s no doubt that Ms. Grant writes great sex scenes, the book is very sex positive and it’s 100% clear that Eden is a sex worker because she wants to be – but I was tempted to fast forward through the sex to get back to the actual story.

However, I loved Chase and the author does a fantastic job of revealing the true extent of the utterly horrific treatment he was subjected to, and treats his trauma and recovery with great sensitivity. He thinks of himself as broken, but he doesn’t give himself enough credit – he doesn’t realise how much respect his teammates have for him, or how strong he really is to have been through what he’s been through and come out the other end determined to put his life back together and to help others. His HEA is very well deserved… I just wish I’d been more convinced by it!

Greg Tremblay and Nicol Zanzarella have teamed up again for the narration, which is – no surprises – superb. Their performances are clearly differentiated, well-paced, and wonderfully nuanced; Mr. Tremblay delivers a compelling and highly emotional performance during that chapter that will make you want to howl with anger, marvel at the character’s inner strength and make you tear up, all at the same time. Ms. Zanzarella’s portrayal of Eden is excellent, too – the character’s confidence, compassion and determination come through strongly. Both are great at voicing characters of the opposite sex, and, as experienced narrators of romance, perform the sex scenes with exactly the degree of confidence and flair needed to pull them off convincingly.

But ultimately, Broken Falcon is a bit of a mixed bag. The narration is excellent, but the plot, while interesting, wasn’t as riveting as I’d hoped it would be. The pacing issues and overdone internal monologuing were problematic enough for me to drop the grade a bit, and the emphasis on sex at the expense of romance caused me to drop it a bit further. I’ll certainly be picking up whatever Rachel Grant comes up with next, because her books are always worth reading and I continue to be a big fan. But this one didn’t quite hit the spot for me.

Note: there is frequent discussion of sexual abuse and one chapter (27) in which it takes place on the page; these details are part of the author’s note at the beginning, so you might want to check that out first if this is a potentially triggering subject.

Caz

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