Review: Jagged Edge

Jagged Edge by Cara Carnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong three and a half stars.

Mary Reynolds is 50% of the operational powerhouse known as the Quillery Edge, Mary is The Edge. Together she and her friend Vi have masterminded more SpecOps missions than anyone else. They are the brains behind the business known as The Hive. Some months ago the owner and founder of The Hive, Peter Rugers, had an 'accident' and died in mysterious circumstances. Since then Mary and Vi have been worked flat out by Peter's business partner Martin Driggs who is taking on questionable jobs and making reckless decisions.

The book opens with Mary having been captured, She is mentally and physcially tortured, raped and drugged in an attempt to extract her secrets, especially the cutting edge HERA security program they developed, but not even the knowledge that the kidnappers are doing the same to Vi in the cell next door is enough to make her talk.

Dylan Mason and his six brothers run a rival organisation, The Arsenal, based in their small home town. Each of the brothers has special forces experience one way and another and they are in awe of the skills of The Edge. When they get a tip off that The Edge has been kidnapped they are 'all in' - but what do the kidnappers really want and who made the tip off?

I enjoy spec ops/romances but they can be a little formulaic and the male characters can be a bit like cardboard cut-outs, similarly many authors write these kick-ass female characters who nonetheless somehow need rescuing by a bigger, badder man. Not kidding, she could be the deadliest assassin in the world at the start of the book but halfway through she becomes a crying shaking wreck clinging to the arm of the alpha male.

Cara Carnes managed to avoid that pitfall. Mary Reynolds is focused on her job with a singular dedication, she has no hobbies and no life outside The Hive. She eats, breathes and sleeps missions and she's crazy good at what she does. She has trouble socialising, except with her three friends from MIT and she has body-image issues.

Dylan is the middle Mason brother, he has had a bad experience in the past and has sworn off relationships, but there's something about The Edge which gets under his skin. Except he realises that The Edge and Mary Reynolds are two very different people: the confident woman in the control room who orders around field operatives with calm authority, who flirts and deliberately pushes to get results and the timid woman behind the persona who feels she is worthless and expendable.

There's a whole load of backstory for Mary (and Dylan) that only gets alluded to, as a reader you are running to try to keep up with the pace of events and just trying to work out who is who and what is going on. I don't know whether there was a previous series or maybe a prequel novella but there's a lot of other stuff swirling around - I like that, I like that things from the past are referred to but don't actually have any impact on current events, that not every secret is revealed, that the reader is forced to guess and speculate and wonder.

I guessed who was behind the kidnapping - but then I probably had a guess list of four or five people so it's not as though it was that obvious.

My only fear is that each of Mary's friends will hook up with another Mason brother and that Dylan's sister Riley will hook up with one of the male operatives in an increasingly incestuous circle of romance.

There's no cliffhanger, although the Mason brothers discover that something wrong appears to be going on in the next town, people are getting hurt and the townspeople are running scared - presumably that's the subject of the next book.

I liked this, it reminded me somewhat of Elle Kennedy's excellent Killer Instincts series or Julie Ann Walker's Black Knights Inc series. I would definitely read the next in the series.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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