“Hard to Hold,” Stephanie Tyler

“Hard to Hold,” by Stephanie Tyler (Dell 2009) is a roman­tic sus­pense novel, the first in a tril­ogy fea­tur­ing Navy SEAL’s. The first story in this series fea­tures Lieu­tenant Junior Grade Jake Hansen. I think this quote lifted from the pro­logue gives you a hint of what these sto­ries are all about:

“We want to be in a sit­u­a­tion under max­i­mum pres­sure, max­i­mum inten­sity and max­i­mum dan­ger. When it’s shared with oth­ers, it pro­vides a bond which is stronger than any tie that can exist.

I’ve read many roman­tic sus­pense nov­els in my 18+ years of read­ing. Some sto­ries writ­ten more than ten years ago can kick the ass off the books writ­ten today. When you read Risky Games by Olga Bicos, which is a smartly writ­ten roman­tic sus­pense novel, then we can talk. Mov­ing on.

I’ve noticed a few peo­ple were rav­ing about Stephanie Tyler’s “Hard to Hold.” I thought: let me give this one a try. Maybe I’ll find a new author. No such luck.

The action kicks off from page one when a hostage sit­u­a­tion arises in the jun­gles of Africa. Navy SEAL offi­cers Jake Hansen and Nick Devane’s mis­sion hasn’t gone smoothly. Jake was shot at dur­ing a ran­dom skir­mish and they’ve both been run­ning for the past three days with what­ever intel and equip­ment they were able to recover.

They’re only a mile away when they get the call that a Amer­i­can doc­tor, Isabelle Markham, has been spot­ted alive. She was kid­napped and left for dead by her body­guard. Refugees are mov­ing out of the jun­gle under rebel fire and Isabelle’s injuries makes this res­cue a chal­lenge. Dur­ing some down time, the two share a con­nec­tion, a moment. Isabelle asks Jake, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and he reluc­tantly tells her his answer after she tells him hers. They share a kiss and then they are saved.

Two months later, Isabelle has been work­ing at the clinic at the mil­i­tary base where Jake’s been sta­tioned. Jake is sur­prised and a lit­tle annoyed to see her. Isabelle has always wanted to catch up with him and thank him for sav­ing her life. But Jake doesn’t want to get involved with some­one who’s drawn to him because he res­cued them or some vari­a­tion of that and of course, he does get emo­tion­ally involved in the secrets and lies that sur­rounds Isabelle’s family.

Jack also agrees to pro­vide Isabelle pro­tec­tion. She’s the tar­get of a deadly mer­ce­nary who is itch­ing to strike back at her mother and uncle. She’s just the valu­able chess piece for him to use in his game of revenge.

While this book wasn’t bad per se, it didn’t stand out either. Like I said, I’ve enjoyed my share of good roman­tic sus­pense nov­els so chalk this up as a “I’ve read bet­ter.” Also, the story is not well plot­ted and lacks sub­stance. The mys­tery ele­ment in here wasn’t dif­fi­cult and the secrets were easy to guess. The romance was a #rom­fail because I could have did with­out all this non­sen­si­cal, dizzy­ing back and forth drama.

Jake had the usual emo­tional bag­gage: bad child­hood (check), shady past (check), wild kid out of con­trol (check) and he was also a speed demon (check) and arro­gant (check plus). He is at times rea­son­able. He didn’t try to talk Isabelle out of going back to Africa (yes she wants to go back!). He had some good qual­i­ties along with some annoy­ing ones.

And I am per­son­ally tired of the hero being described as being best at every­thing but it’s not a deal breaker. The hero­ine wasn’t too annoy­ing but she is “spe­cial” and stood out. She’s a gifted recon­struc­tive plas­tic sur­geon. Her mother is a state Sen­a­tor. Her uncle is an Admi­ral in the army. She vol­un­teers her time with Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders where she feels needed and lastly, she was engaged to a pedi­a­tri­cian but it didn’t work out. Now she’s the tar­get of a nut job.

Jake along with Nick and Chris are broth­ers and all are Navy SEALs. They are not blood broth­ers. Nick and Jake were adopted by Chris’s fam­ily but not in any legal sense. They just grew up together and have a bond. They all fit the famil­iar char­ac­ter types that I’ve seen before in my reading.

Nick is described as some­one who has the need for speed (gee, haven’t we read this before?) and well, I guess every fam­ily has to have one, the crazy one and that would be Chris, with his two dif­fer­ent col­ored eyes. There was some weird stuff with the father being psy­chic that I just didn’t even indulge in.

Just about every­body had a point of view in here with the added flash­backs for con­text. I liked the end­ing so there’s that and the vil­lain was real enough and wasn’t paper­board thin which was also good. I couldn’t recall any too stu­pid to live moments which is another plus. I see a lot of read­ers enjoy­ing this story but not me. I just pre­fer some­thing more orig­i­nal and spec­tac­u­lar and a cut above. C. This story just lacked sub­stance to me.