While this is the second book in a series, following the exploits of the SNAP Agency, where SNAP stands for Strategic Neutralization And Protection, I found that I wasn't hindered by not reading the first. The beginning of the series is 'Lights Out' and, while its lead characters, Brynn Taylor and Jack Hudson, are here playing their part, the lead this time out is their colleague, Kekoa Young, making it almost a first book for the second time. This one came in as an unsolicited submission but I happily grabbed it, given that it clearly had a strong focus on IT, Kekoa and I both working in the field. However, even though I'm hardly a sucker for romantic suspense, I enjoyed this more from that angle than the IT one.

I'm not entirely sure what SNAP's official remit is, but they seem to be a government department that works for the public sector. The core case here involves an instance of suspected corporate espionage, a leak in a company called Lepley Dynamics, who are a major supplier of military tech to the Department of Defense. Somehow their plans are being implemented by other companies in other countries, not so friendly with the U.S. and nobody can figure out how. It doesn't seem like anyone's hacking in, so maybe someone within the company is leaking the information out.

It's up to Kekoa, a former Navy cryptologist who now seems to be the entire IT department for SNAP, to figure out who and he narrows the leak down to the workstation of Elinor Mitchell, who happens to live in the same apartment complex. Oh yeah, there are some major plot conveniences here that we can't question too much without everything falling apart. This one, for instance, isn't quite as convenient as we might expect, because SNAP moved Kekoa into this apartment complex so that he could take on the surveillance job needed, but he didn't know that until he was already talking to her, so his private life is clearly being manipulated by his employers, who we're supposed to see as sympathetic.

Anyway, Kekoa is tasked with keeping an eye on Elinor, which would be all the easier if he could make an impression on her and become friends. Of course, being romantic suspense, he falls for her instead and that only plays into the hands of the still supposedly sympathetic SNAP Agency. That she falls for him as well must have made the powers that be at SNAP rub their hands together in obviously non-villainous glee as their plans bear fruit. Fortunately, if we can gloss over that angle and concentrate on these two pawns in the game, we get to the good stuff. And, quite frankly, it's when Kekoa and Elinor really fall for each other that the book starts getting good.

I can't say that I didn't like what happens before that, but it certainly didn't warrant the book's strong 4.61 average on Goodreads. There's no way that an agency as important as SNAP is going to function on a staff of about half a dozen, but that's the level that a TV show would focus on, so that's what Natalie Walters creates here. The catch is that, on those TV shows, there are hundreds of minions wandering in the background doing nothing except making the place look appropriately busier, and that's hard to do in a novel, so we're given the firm impression that SNAP can function on a skeleton staff with all the IT needs taken care of by one jovial Hawaiian who can presumably never take a day off.

The good thing is that I liked this jovial Hawaiian. On the TV shows that obviously influenced this, we're always supposed to be watching the stars, who are the action guys in the field, like the leads in the first book that I haven't read. I tend to find them all intensely boring, but dig the real characters in support, usually the IT guys or the morgue guys or the lab guys. And that's Kekoa. He's not a natural lead at all, who doesn't work in the field, but he reluctantly steps up for this mission, given that he's the only team member living next to Elinor Mitchell. And I loved that. I loved that he's a lead who never wanted to be a lead. I loved that he's a regular guy, not an action hero. And I loved that he's hardly the typical lead in a romance novel either, which makes everything that happens all the more real, even if his methods of manipulating technology aren't.

Yes, I cringed at the IT and how it all functions on TV logic, where results are instant and their complex queries don't need to be carefully coded and debugged, merely hammered into a keyboard at lightning speed. There are two problems for any author to solve here. One is accuracy, where they need to know that a spreadsheet isn't a database and neither is a mouse. Walters is good there, not because she's a tech but because she did her research. But the other is believability, where they need to know how folk talk about stuff and what flies in a corporate environment, and Walters doesn't do as well with this.

For instance, a military industrial company working on multi-year billion dollar contracts is not going to allow its project managers to bring their personal laptops into the office and have them auto-connect to wifi so they can browse the web. That goes quadruple when those particular project managers have question marks hanging over them as prime suspects for corporate espionage. And no project manager on the planet is going to be surprised to see 143 messages in their inbox. Elinor Mitchell isn't believable as a project manager in the slightest.

But I digress. I may not buy into the IT behind Kekoa or Elinor but I bought into them. Elinor may not be believable as a project manager but she is believable as a human being and as an everywoman caught up in a web of intrigue. Kekoa may not be believable as an entire IT department, but he's believable as a human being too and as a reluctant lead who finds himself stuck in the same web of intrigue without the ability to even mention that to the girl he's falling for.

Much of this is in the detail. As the name might suggest, Kekoa is Hawaiian and there's a great deal of Hawaiian culture thrown into the mix here: food and language and traditional customs. I bought into all of that, even though I'm well aware that it may play as horribly wrong to a Hawaiian as the IT played to this systems operations engineer and risk manager, but I don't know any better so it felt right to me. It had the right emotional resonance, because it was backed by little stories and larger griefs and all the things that bring people together. I utterly bought into the junior sleuths and the burnt toast, sledding in the rain and a surfing tragedy.

Put simply, the conversations all work, as deliberately awkward as some of them are. In fact, they work all the better for being deliberately awkward. There are a number of reasons why I don't tend to read romance, but one is that I never found myself represented in romance novels. It isn't just that the leads don't look like me, it's that they don't think like me and certainly don't act like me. I'm not represented in any of them, but I quickly identified with Kekoa, even though I'm not Hawaiian. He's a nerd and a nice guy and he's awkward and I understand all those things. OK, he's also inevitably an imposing and, sure, handsome figure, but I don't need to be in a romance novel, I just need to feel enough connection to be sympathetic and that was definitely the case here.

So, I guess this may work differently depending on what angle you come to it from. As romance, it's very good, thoroughly enjoyable even to someone as far from a romance fan as me. As suspense, it works to a pretty strong degree. Yeah, there are flaws and holes and plenty of conveniences but I've read much worse by more established authors. They didn't spoil the tension for me, even if I rolled my eyes quite a few times. Even the IT isn't bad because it's not really wrong, it just doesn't feel right. And much of the reason for that is that it's written from the convenient standpoint of TV dramas that have to wrap up a case in a single episode. If you come to this as, say, an NCIS fan, in search of the thrills you know but in a romantic suspense framework, this does the job, but the more you know, the lesser it becomes. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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