"Broken," Shiloh Walker

Pros: Fantastic characters and twisty plot; wonderful sex scenes
Cons: None that I can think of
Rating: 5 out of 5

Review book courtesy of Penguin Group.

Last week, when I finished reading Shiloh Walker’s Broken, I turned to my husband and said, “you know I haven’t been feeling well when it takes me two months to get around to reading a Shiloh Walker book.” Yes, it took heavy-duty medication side effects to keep me from tearing into one of her excellent novels immediately upon arrival. I’ve been a rabid fangirl ever since I received my first review copy of one of her books—and that doesn’t happen to me all that often.

Broken is the sequel to the marvelous Fragile; this book focuses on Quinn Rafferty, Luke’s brother, a bounty hunter for a private detective agency. He’s a grouchy loner with little interest in anyone, but a soft spot for helping abused women. Then one day he comes home to the apartment he’s renting from an elderly lady to find she’s taken in another tenant—waitress Sara Davis. It’s obvious she’s hiding from her own problems, but of greater concern to him is the fact that he’s actually attracted to her. He’s been hurt too much already, and he doesn’t want to be hurt again. Nor does he want to get caught up in her problems. Unfortunately, he won’t have much choice in the matter, as she turns out to be tied to one of his cases.

Both Quinn and Sara are fantastic characters. Shiloh manages to take the pairing of gruff loner and feisty heroine and give them plenty of new depth and dimension. I won’t give anything away, but I will say that by the end of the book I was quite surprised at exactly how unusual a romance heroine Sara really turned out to be. As for Quinn, he had a depth and range of emotion and past life experiences that set him apart from many other romance heroes.

As is typical for Shiloh Walker novels, we get more than a little glimpse into the world of social work, abused spouses and children, and so on. Just to warn you, yes, her novels can get a bit dark. She doesn’t flinch away from showing the worst of human nature as well as the best. I did find the villain in this one to be a tad more on the simplistic side than her usual, but it was a fine line, and at least partly caused by the fact that we tend to see him through other people’s eyes—those people who have reason to hate and despise him.

Broken provides a wonderful mix of enjoyable characters, gorgeously hot sex scenes (Shiloh does some of the best, IMO—I never find myself laughing at inappropriate places when I read her books), tension, action, a surprisingly twisty plot, and drama. This is definitely one of my favorite recent reads!