Somehow it's been five months since I reviewed a book published by Revell, which regular readers will immediately identify as a romantic suspense novel peppered with brief moments of Christian propaganda. Yes, this is one of those, but it's also my first return to a Revell author and I was keen to see how that would play out. 'Blind Trust' is the third book in Natalie Walters's series about 'The SNAP Agency' and I reviewed its predecessor, 'Fatal Code', last year.

'Fatal Code' was a surprise because I enjoyed the romance more than the investigation. I found the romance here rather palatable too, but also that it tied very closely to the investigation, with both of them focused on the core theme of trust. Switching up her leads yet again, Walters has Lyla Fox working for Nicolás Garcia, even though they struggle to get along because they're so different.

Fox is a wildcard, ever willing to live dangerously to get the job done. Garcia is far more by-the-book and that makes it difficult for him to trust her in the field and, as he starts to realise how much he's starting to care about her, just as difficult for him to trust her within his personal life as a potential significant other. Clearly, they have to find the middle ground, where Fox can understand that she's worrying her colleagues and Garcia can grasp that she's capable enough to manage the risks she's willing to take. Will they accomplish that by the end of the book? C'mon. Do you doubt it?

In 'Fatal Code', the romance sparked from the case at hand. Walters sets up a situation that needs to be resolved and part of that resolution involves Kekoa, the IT guy, going into the field to keep an eye on Elinor, the suspect. It's only once that investigation starts to gain traction that they realise that they're falling for each other and suddenly we're in romantic suspense territory. Here, it's the romance that comes first, Fox and Garcia not new to each other, merely newly acknowledging each other in a different way than just colleagues. The case comes later.

Well, I say case but there isn't really a case here. Annoyingly, I didn't take notes while reading this one and I'm struggling to remember what the case actually was. Tellingly, while that was partly due to me firmly intending to write it up immediately after reading, which I completely failed to do, the most abiding reason is that there wasn't much to take notes about. There's more depth to the case Fox resolves in the opening chapter than there is in the one that occupies the rest of the book.

In fact, they don't even have a case, just a situation. Lyla helped put Jerome Michael Miller behind bars at some point in the past, presumably in the first book in the series, and he never got out, but he's apparently not willing to be forgotten. He sends her a death threat at work, accompanied by a rock through the windscreen of her Audi. You'll die next, it says, which is pretty ballsy, especially from a criminal not known for violence, his crimes committed through keyboards given that he was a manipulator of cryptocurrencies. And, as they soon find out, the freakiest aspect to all this is that Miller died two days earlier. So why was his message delivered now?

It's a promising case, but it isn't one that warrants much investigation, more a constant awareness of the surroundings of the SNAP team as they go about their business, most of which seems to have to do with Lyla's rather well-to-do family. They go on an honest-to-goodness foxhunt at one point, a foxhunt without an actual fox because you're not going to see an actual bloodsport in a book that's aimed firmly at Christian readers of the sort who complain in reviews that Walters had one of her supporting characters say "poop". The point is that, wherever they go, whoever's following through on Miller's threat is likely to be there too, attempting to come good on his promise.

Even at the distance of a mere couple of weeks, that whole angle has faded in my memory because it was never that important to Walters when she was writing the book. What she cared about was a pair of characters who start out very different to each other but with clear chemistry and how she can believably manouevre them into acknowledging that they ought to become an actual couple. It doesn't matter what danger is surrounding them, what matters is their connection and how they'll come to realise it. In its way, this is the least romantic suspense novel I've read from Revell, even if it works as a romance set against a backdrop of suspense.

Fortunately, like 'Fatal Code', I bought into the romance. I'm not a fan of the romance genre, but I appreciated this from that angle a lot more than I did whatever else was going on. Had I not got on board with Fox and Garcia, this would have ended up a pretty awful book, because there's so little else on offer. With other Revell books, I've enjoyed the investigative side of the stories, even if I'm not particularly interested in the romance unfolding in their midst. Here that really isn't possible, as evidenced by the fact that not a single review at Goodreads mentions the backdrop in any more detail than "the story was great", before launching into plaudits for the romance.

And that's really telling for me. Without my usual notes to work from, it's usually helpful to take a glance through Goodreads to grab an antagonist's name or a date or some other important detail. Not a single reviewer apparently cared about that sort of thing, so I had to find my reading glasses and dive back into the book to locate those little snippets. If they cared about anything more than the two leads ending up together, it was that Walters quoted enough verses from scripture for the book to be worthy in their sight. Am I honestly the only one reading these books for plot? To be fair, this is the first Revell book to let me down on that front. But answers on the back of a postcard to the usual address... ~~ Hal C F Astell

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