ARC Review: Hard Justice by April Hunt

“The story wasn’t bad, by any means, but along the way I lost interest in the two main characters a bit.”
~ Under the Covers

I’ve been looking for a new romantic suspense series to sink my teeth into recently, and I thought this had a lot of potential. OK, the cover said it had a lot of potential *grins*. I’d never read this author before and haven’t read many reviews either, so I went into it pretty blind. I always enjoy stories with a female operative because they can be quite badass.

HARD JUSTICE is the third in the Alpha Security series and I wasn’t lost reading this out of order. From the beginning we can feel a spark and chemistry between team operatives Charlie and Vince. They’ve danced around that attraction it seems for a while and they now have an assignment together.

Vince is an ex-SEAL, member of Alpha Security and … bartender. This whole bar business is probably something I’m missing from earlier in the series it just seemed a bit out of place for what the characters do for a living. Does he get any downtime or is his downtime to work more at the bar? I still liked his character because he wasn’t just 100% alpha, there was also a good sense of humor and great banter between him and Charlie. They were very entertaining together.

The first half of this book was really strong and kept me interested, but somewhere around that mark it started missing some of that special something that made me want to keep picking this up and reading. The story wasn’t bad, by any means, but along the way I lost interest in the two main characters a bit. I couldn’t put my finger on what changed for me.

Charlie has a past she’s hidden that’s finally coming back to haunt her in this assignment and she will get to deal with those demons. Vince has issues of his own why he wants to keep a relationship with Charlie out of the cards. Some of these plots at times feel like they’ve been used so many times to create conflict between main characters that it gets repetitive for me. I kinda wish we would’ve seen something different and fresh thrown at them to keep them apart instead of those issues. In the end, it seemed kinda easy to just get over anyway. And sorry, I’m trying to be vague about what so it doesn’t spoil the book.

This book falls somewhere in the middle for me. I enjoyed reading it but it didn’t stand out so much than I need to rush and get the rest of the series, but I may continue it.