"Reckless," Saskia Walker

Pros: Beautiful milieu; enjoyable main characters
Cons: Somehow not as memorable as it could be
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Review book courtesy of Penguin Group.
Visit Saskia Walker’s website.

Katrina is an art evaluator for a London auction house. She’s led a structured, reliable, demure life, but she’s ready for that to change. She just found out that her (now ex-) fiancee had been having an affair, and he tries to run her life at work as well. So when Sergio Teodoro comes to her office and offers to whisk her away to Spain to evaluate his father’s collection—his attention clearly caught by her as well as her professional talents—she jumps at the opportunity to be reckless.

Things get complicated almost as soon as she arrives in Spain, however. She’s approached by Sergio’s disinherited younger brother, Nicolas, who’s an irresistibly passionate artist. He wants her to believe Sergio doesn’t have the right to sell off the collection, but Sergio insists Nicolas just wants a cut of something that isn’t rightfully his.

Can Katrina figure out who to believe—before she ends up a casualty of the family’s dark secrets?

Saskia Walker’s Reckless has a great deal to recommend it. Nicolas is an enjoyable departure from the current crop of military heroes (not that I don’t enjoy those, but variety is good), as a passionate performance artist and teacher. Sergio starts out fairly interesting as well, as a darkly handsome and compelling ‘bad boy’ businessman, but he seems to devolve a bit, becoming more one-dimensional as he becomes more obviously a bad guy.

Unfortunately Katrina is one of the weak spots in this novel. She isn’t incredibly memorable as a character, somehow; I kept forgetting her name, for one thing. She also goes a bit beyond the believable in how dense she is at times (particularly when misinterpreting something Nicolas is trying to tell her). She has her good points as a heroine, however, particularly in how determined she becomes once she’s convinced and set on a course of action.

The milieu of Spain is very enjoyable when it plays its part: there are two scenes in Barcelona that are particularly evocative, and the description of the Teodoro family estate is quite lovely. Outside of that, however, the setting doesn’t play much of a part, and I would have liked to see more of it.

I’m somewhat torn in my evaluation of Reckless. The erotic material [Standard adult material warning: explicit sex] is particularly good—Nicolas and Katrina have a ton of chemistry and their scenes definitely sizzle. As I noted earlier, Nicolas is a fantastic male lead. Unfortunately, the rest of the book, while technically good, just didn’t catch hold of me.