Where There's Smoke (To Serve and Protect 3) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This isn't a bad or terrible story; it just wasn't a good read for me personally. When I'd finished it, I felt as if I could have better spent my time reading something else.
There were a couple of things I did love about this book. It is an interracial romance, which I happen to love. The heroine Kate is white and the hero Toby is half black and half NA. And Toby is the other thing I loved about this book. Besides being a non-white hero, he is a hunky firefighter, and he is so caring and gentle with Kate. He really has the patience of a saint when dealing with her. And that brings me to what in the book I didn't like.
Spoilers--------------
Kate is trying to get over being raped three years ago. This is the main conflict between them throughout the book. I sympathized with her and her past, with her panic attacks and anxiety. I know that panic can take control, causing you to react instinctively, without even knowing what you are doing. What I didn't like was how this stretched on and on, seeming more like filler than actual story to me. I understand that she will have setbacks, given her abuse and rape, but the back and forth between doubt and trust, even after they had had sex, even after the exchange of I love you's? Kate says she loves Toby, that he is the most understanding and caring of men, and then she is overcome with enough doubt to even think that Toby would torch her pub?
I really don't get how Kate can have enough trust to accept Toby into her life, into her past, and into her bed, yet still consider he could do something so malicious and spiteful as destroying her place. Even knowing what Toby had almost done as a teenager doesn't justify her doubt in my opinion. This is the man who, after three years of fear, she let love her and touch her all over in the most intimate of ways; this suspicion and distrust of him just didn't make sense. While Kate's confusion and doubt are understandable in the beginning, it soon became tedious to me.
The other thing that bothered me was the baddie. I figured who it was and it still made no sense that this would be the person doing all this to Kate. I just didn't buy the reasoning behind it. That could have been done a lot better, or maybe it should have been another character doing it. I didn't buy the 'surprise' of who the bad guy was.
While I loved Toby, it's not enough to make me say I liked this story. To me, this is just an average or okay read, and this review is just my opinion. I can't say I hated it, but neither can I say I liked it.

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Kate Darby has suffered horrors worse than imaginable in the past. She's closed off her personal life to focus all her time and energy on the pub her father bequeathed to her. When her bar comes under attack by a vandal and sexy, sweet Toby Angel is there with unending emotional support, she can't turn him away.He gets under her skin and helps her heal. But when he's the one accused of damaging her pub, can she find it in herself to trust in him? She's always believed that where there's smoke...

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