This is the first in the Steele Street series.
Regan McKinney followed in her grandfather's footsteps and became a paleontologist, but instead of working in the field with him she leads a very quiet life working in a museum. Her routine is disrupted when her grandfather goes missing and no one will believe that there's a problem. Everyone thinks he has gone off on a dig and simply forgotten to check in. Regan knows that his memory is going, but doesn't believe that he would stay out of touch for so long. He raised Regan and her sister Nikki after their parents were killed and he is very aware that they worry if he is out of touch. Regan checks his date book and finds a notation about a meeting in a small desert town so she decides to drive out and see if someone there knows her grandfather's whereabouts.
Quinn Younger is a former juvenile delinquent who made good. He went to college and then joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot and was decorated for heroism. Now he works for an ultra-secret special ops group called SDF, which operates out of a garage in Denver. After being wounded during an investigation Quinn has been sent to the desert to hide out from the arms dealer who wants to kill him. Kid, another member of SDF, has been sent along to act as his back up.
When Quinn sees Regan he recognizes her immediately. One summer her grandfather took in a group of troubled boys as part of a juvenile court diversion program and used them as assistants on his dig. Quinn was one of those boys and it turned his life around. Regan was also part of the dig's crew and Quinn developed a crush on her. He has never forgotten the time he walked into her tent and accidentally saw her topless.
Bad guys follow Regan to town and Quinn & Kid quickly realize that her grandfather really is in trouble. They also realize that Regan & Nikki could be in danger from whoever is looking for him. Kid is sent to guard Nikki while Quinn and Regan try to figure out where her grandfather is and what his disappearance has to do with the shipment of dinosaur bones SDF found during their investigation. Attraction quickly heats up for both couples.
Pros:
Janzen has a fun, punchy writing style that keeps the action moving along at a brisk pace.
The involvement of the dinosaur bones gave the plot a bit of something that wasn't just the same old same old.
Quinn & Regan are both interesting and basically likable.
Cons:
The sex, while hot, is sort of ridiculous. Quinn & Regan get busy for the first time on the hood of Quinn's muscle car while it's idling. A car hood gets pretty hot when the engine is running so I couldn't figure out quite how that would work. I also couldn't stop thinking about how much gas those things burn and how environmentally irresponsible it was not to turn the car off. That is not the sort of thing I want to be thinking during a sex scene. It also made me wonder if it was setting things up for Quinn & Regan to run out of gas at some critical point later in the story (see Chekhov's gun). That was sort of distracting until they made it to SDF HQ and I realized that it wasn't going to happen.
The ridiculous didn't stop there. Doing it in the elevator at the SDF HQ made a bit more sense than the car hood, but when they had sex in a warehouse while hiding from the bad guys I sort of threw up my hands. That's one of my least favorite tropes because it's just nuts. Adrenaline can certainly make a person horny, but for folks who don't have a death wish that reaction normally doesn't kick in until the danger has passed.
The other major problem was Nikki. I did not like her at all. She's an artist and her attitude is that she's entitled to do pretty much anything if it helps her art. There's a guy that Nikki likes to use as a model. He is interested in Regan, but she doesn't return that interest. As payment for his modeling Nikki secretly takes salacious pictures of Regan and gives them to the guy. In other words she basically pimps out the sister who sacrificed to help raise her after their parents died. Nice.
And she's an equal opportunity user. When Kid shows up Nikki & the model are working. Her art is very sexual and she knows that it's making Kid a bit uncomfortable. She takes advantage of an unguarded moment to take his picture to use in a later art project, even though Kid has already expressly refused to model for her. When she & Kid get together he doesn't know that she did this and she doesn't tell him.
For me, taking away someone's ability to give informed consent is one of the worst things you can do, so I didn't buy the book's presentation of Nikki as a good kid who is just a little spoiled. Needless to say I had no interest in seeing Kid & Nikki get together, but the book spends almost as much time on them as on Quinn & Regan.
Grade: C-
Will I read the next book in the series?: Probably not. There are 5 more books in the Steele Street series and 4 books and counting in the follow-up Steele Street-Loose series. I don't think I liked this well enough to wade into that many books.
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