Without Warning

3.5 stars.

Five stars for suspense and interesting main characters.

Minus one-half star for being able to guess the villain(s) from the moment of meeting. If I'm going to guess that early on, I prefer Eason's books that are written more like thrillers than mysteries, with us knowing up front who the villain is and watching the protagonists get hunted (as in her Fatal Reunions series, which I loved). But in this one, a pretense of secrecy is there, and that got on my nerves a bit. It took out some of the suspense for me, since some of that suspense was built on the mystery instead of only the villain's goals and the hero and heroine's survival of them.

Minus one-half star for some instances of really choppy writing, sentences missing subjects or direct objects and thus becoming confused: “He held her tight, her fears valid.” (pg 41) Was she afraid he was going to hold her, or what? Not according to the context, but the sentence really jarred.
Also, numbers of run-on sentences caused by improper comma usage: “The man had called him at home, he must be getting desperate.” (Pg. 56) I can swallow one or two, but having scrambled sentences or bum commas in each chapter got old after awhile.

Minus one-half star for word misuse. Seems like someone's editor was on vacation...I got a good chuckle out of “the scrolling marquis” because French noblemen really don't have the habit of applying themselves as text at the bottom of a tv screen...marquee is the proper word. (Debatably; it is a stretch to use it so...really, it's better to just say “the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen.”) And the term spelled “if worse comes to worse” is actually expressed as either “worse comes to worst” (comparative superlative) or “worst comes to worst” (Old English saying). Finding word misuse in recent novels is really beginning to try my nerves; seems like the editors are letting spellcheck do too much of their checking for them. Argh.

Content: well, Riley was a great Christian influence. But I didn't feel that Daniel and Katie ever really laid a grasp on salvation; the trickle of belief at the end of the book didn't seem to be...oh, I guess authentic enough. It felt less organic and more like it was just supposed to happen for a Christian novel.

And then, also, it bothered me that the two were so hasty to kiss each other, and more than once.