A risk worth taking?

Brynn Kelly is a New Zealand author and former journalist. I picked up A risk worth taking at my local library and was drawn to the book from the cover and the legionnaire and conspiracy and computer hacking themes. I thought I'd give it a go, even though the book is categorised as romance-suspense (what does that even mean?) and that only feeds into 50% of my reading interests 😉. Was it a risk worth taking? Read on to find out!

A risk worth taking | Published May 2018 | Read October 2024

The premise of the book promises a lot. The book starts with Samira Desta, a talented computer security expert. She has been in hiding for a year because her fiancé, Latif, discovered that a US Senator and presidential candidate is responsible for orchestrating a terrorist attack on US soil. The Senator green lit Latif's murder and his clean up crew has been searching for Samira ever since.

Samira's cover is broken after a year flying under the radar. Legionnaire Jamie Armstrong, a burly Scotsman and former doctor, comes to her aid. The rest of the book is spent charting Samira and Jamie's fight to stay alive with a bunch of the Senator's bad guys on their trail while they also try to find a way to expose him and his heinous crimes.

A risk worth taking is part of a series of legionnaire stories featuring Jamie and his buddies. I understand that Samira is introduced in a previous book. There is obviously a backstory on their romantic attraction. It spills over into A risk worth taking, and in doing so takes up far too much of the story for my liking. The "fighting our attraction" thing wore thin for me after a few pages and I wanted less of it and more action of the thriller variety. I also felt like I needed to know the cast of characters from reading past books as their personalities and dynamics would have been better understood with more context.

I stuck with the book through all the posturing from Jamie and Samira about their respective issues, stop-start relationship, and past mistakes. All that felt overblown to me in the face of the serious danger they were in as the Senator was hot on their trail. I liked the action as they tried to stay one step ahead, though. The conclusion to the story is clever, suspenseful and believable. If the book had stuck to the action, it would have been a winner for me.

I have no issue with Kelly's writing, I just don't think I am a romance reader. I like books about relationships, with complex and quirky humans and their scars and bruises on show, but emotional outpourings aren't my jam.

I tried to like Samira. She is clever, resourceful, and kind of a bad ass despite her anxieties and frequent panic attacks. I just found her repetitious obsessive thoughts a bit much. I valiantly tried to warm to her but to no avail. I did develop a slight literary crush on Jamie, though, and I could definitely read more books about his legionnaire activities. That said, he was pretty much an embodiment of the flawed yet strong and protective hero trope 😏.

The book is intense, well-paced and intelligently plotted for a cat-and-mouse-type thriller, so I had a hard time giving it a rating. Lovers of romance novels may have wanted more romance and less suspense (and I've seen comments to this effect on other review sites) but I definitely like it the other way around. The so-called romance in the book wasn't even all that to me. It was all just a deluge of anxious "will they or won't they?" emotions. Thumbs up for the hot but damaged Scottish legionnaire, though 💞.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐