Suzanne Brockmann’s Out of Control is the fourth Troubleshooters book, featuring everyone’s favorite SEAL geek, Ken “WildCard” Karmody. Finally over being dumped by his long-term girlfriend, he falls hard in one night for Savannah von Hopf, who has a flat tire outside his house . . .
. . . except that she hadn’t told him why she was outside his house to start with. Turns out she knew him already (she went to college with his ex), and had purposefully come to town to ask him to go to Indonesia with her, because her uncle’s been kidnapped. This is not a happy morning-after relevation.
Obviously, this starts out with two of my least favorite romance scenarios, deception and love at first sight. To my pleasure, however, instead of waiting most of the book for the inevitable fallout, within the first hundred pages, we get to see the inherent tensions in the scenarios burst out and jump up and down all over Ken and Savannah’s emotions. The rest of the long book is about how to move past deception and love at first sight. So I’d be quite inclined to like it anyway, even if I didn’t happen to find Ken amusing to read about.
(Certainly more amusing than the guest appearances by the angst puppets Alyssa Locke and Sam Starrett, who appear to be done for good in this book, except not, because book six is all about them. I really am tempted to just skip straight to the most recent one, Breaking Point, because it has a lot of Jules in it, but for now I’m going to be good and read in order; besides, it will probably be a while before the library has a free copy.)
The WWII thread in this one is the memoir of a German-American double agent, Savannah’s grandmother; there’s not a great deal of tension, and the last part is gratuitous, but I did read it. This book also introduces the secondary characters of Molly Anderson and Grady Morant, who are in Breaking Point as well.
Does it count as a re-read if I only read the Ken & Savannah bits? Friday I was exhausted and needed something happy and familiar, and this fit the bill admirably.