Denise Baldwin doesn’t do relationships. She barely has time for a one-night stand. But missing after-work cocktails with Rob, her best friend and favorite law enforcement park ranger … she wouldn’t dream of it. The little dive bar is the perfect place for Denise to vent about her new protégé, who is as annoyingly perky as she is ambitious. Rob has work issues too. A high-tech poaching ring has … high-tech poaching ring has set up business in his part of the woods. Pursuing them into the back country with nothing but his pistol and a can of bear spray has him taking risks Denise doesn’t even want to know about.
Unexpected feelings bloom in a moment of vulnerability, causing their relationship to take a turn for the worse. Denise can’t seem to do anything right at work and Rob’s mind is anywhere but on the job. When the stakes rise and their worlds crash together, everything falls apart leaving Denise and Rob to reconcile their differences before it’s open season on their lives.
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What A Blockbuster Finale!
Big Game kept me thoroughly entertained from the first page onward. There’s always plenty happening, and the narrative is witty and engaging.
The opening chapter is entertaining due to the engaging voice of the first person narrator and the tiny amount of conflict injected to make the chapter interesting. This chapter doesn’t effectively introduce the main conflict. However, the main relationship conflict and secondary action plot become clearer over the following chapters.
Rob is a grown-up “boy scout” and a genuine home town hero. It’s easy to care what happens to Rob. He is relatable because he is so down to earth and likable because of the way he looks out for others, does his job with conscience, tries to help nature and the environment, and because of the sad loss of his late wife. He is by far my favorite character.
Denise is a lost soul. In some ways, she’s only likable due to the fact that Rob likes her and the reader likes Rob. In particular, her treatment of her prodigy isn’t nice, and she’s overly defensive and verbally aggressive. She’s also often manipulative and shallow. However, she does demonstrate an interesting character development arc, and her viewpoint narration is the most entertaining.
I liked Kacey a lot. She had to put up with a lot of nonsense, and nothing she did helped her with Denise. She was so attentive to Denise that at one point in the story I wondered if she didn’t have a crush on her mentor.
There are two main plots. The most important is the developing relationship arc relating to the two main characters, which follows the second chance romance trope. Rob has lost the love of his life, so can he ever truly love again?
The subplot is an action plot relating to Rob’s job in the wilderness. This plot turns this novel into a romantic suspense and introduces danger and mystery into the novel.
I loved the way that snippets of apparently unconnected information were introduced into the earliest chapters that slowly twine together as the story progresses before all becoming neatly woven into an extremely well-crafted resolution to the action plot at the end of the novel.
Overall, the setting to this story was really well constructed. Grumpy’s Happy Shack is a great place to start this novel. It’s a wonderful place full of ambiance. The office setting and the wilderness setting are both well introduced and described. The venue for the final resolution is intriguing and unique.
The only setting problem I had regarded an incident that happened to Rob. Early on in the story, he asserted that he knew the wilderness really well. Yet, despite this assertion, he had a problem while driving with Isaac in chapter 15. I didn’t believe that this problem could have occurred because Rob would be familiar with such large landmarks. The event wasn’t plausible and so slightly disrupted my suspension of disbelief.
This story is very effectively shown rather than told. The narrative voice is clear and entertaining, told from the different viewpoints of the two main characters. I was never confused about what was happening.
One small problem not really worth mentioning. There is a tiny typo on the second page of chapter 2 with the sentence: How was I supposed move on with this… – a missing “to”.
This is a well-crafted romantic suspense story. It contains many tiny details that are woven with skill into the warp and weft of the mystery plot. The entertaining narration, especially from Denise’s viewpoint, kept me turning the pages. I have no hesitation in rating this second chance romance 5 out of 5.
This is a clever and funny friends to lovers romance with some fun mystery thrown in. Denise is a witty event planner and Rob is a ranger on the hunt for animal poachers. The story all comes together with a clever twist at the end. Very enjoyable read.