Hot Pursuit is the fifteenth book in Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series and a bit of a departure, bumping the suspense in “romantic suspense” way, way up and featuring a character who’s already been happily and permanently paired off: Alyssa Locke is being stalked by a serial killer she pursued in her FBI days.
This book is interesting in the way it creates its tension: we’re promised, in the jacket copy, that the killer will catch Alyssa. But I, at least, didn’t know when, which kept me on the edge of my seat waiting for him to pop out from behind the corner, as it were.
That’s the part I enjoyed the most about this book. The principal secondary thread is a relationship between Dan Gillman, who has been rather a jerk for the recent part of the series and isn’t out of the jerk woods yet [*], and a new character named Jennilyn LeMay. This, well, isn’t complete, so I’ll withhold judgment.
[*] Despite a horribly anvilicious encounter with a small child who, in phonetic babytalk, lays bare (some of) his secret pain. Ack.
The other interesting thing about this book is the ending, which strikes me as the kind of thing that only an author with fourteen other books in the series, many about Alyssa herself, can get away with. (Spoilers, ROT-13: bgurejvfr univat ure uhfonaq erfphr ure sebz gur ovt onq frevny xvyyre juvyr fur vf urycyrff jbhyq unir n engure qvssrerag rssrpg.)
So: if you like the Troubleshooter books for their suspense or for Alyssa, you’ll like this one. I thought it was a fast entertaining library read.