If it’s summer, it must be time for a new Sandra Brown book. The author has published a new romantic-suspense novel just in time for last-minute beach bronzing every year for the past few, like clockwork.
Brown doesn’t disappoint this year, gifting sweltering readers with an equally steamy tale of obsession, love and terror in “Tough Customer.” It’s a big bang for the buck; she offers not one complicated romance but two — as well as a touching mother-daughter story and a craftily elusive villain.
The author brings back Dodge Hanley, an investigator who played a part in 2009’s excellent “Smash Cut,” and makes him the central character here. Curmudgeonly Dodge is contentedly, if not exactly happily, toiling in Atlanta when he gets a frantic call from Caroline King, a woman he loved 30 years before and has never really gotten over.
Caroline’s daughter, 30-year-old Berry (yes, there’s significance in that 30-year coincidence), is being stalked by a deranged former co-worker. Dodge heads to the Houston area to help clean up the mess, both literal and psychic, that has turned Caroline’s and Berry’s lives upside down.
Berry’s lake hideaway has been breached by Oren, the stalker, leaving a friend of Berry’s gravely injured, Berry in shock and her house a bloody shambles. Worst of all, Oren has escaped.
Dodge joins forces with Ski Nyland, a young local deputy sheriff, to track Oren down and keep the women safe, although both Caroline and Berry have plenty of wit and smarts about them. Brown’s heroines are anything but wimpy.
The suspense here mostly overrides the romance, at least until nearly the end of the book, but Brown has such a keen way with building apprehension and panic that the reader will hardly notice the lack of bedroom antics.
You’ll never have to run to the dictionary while reading Sandra Brown.
Describing her villain here, Berry notes, “his ick factor was off the charts.”
FICTION
Tough Customer, by Sandra Brown $26.99
