**bonk** Ouch! **bonk** Ouch! **bonk** Ouch!

That is the sound of the book hitting me over the head with the extremely obvious clues until I was dizzy but the dumb as dirt, brilliant detective couldn't figure out who the killer was until the very end.

Let me first say, this is the first heterosexual romance I've read in awhile. I had read several mediocre M/M romances in a row and was ready for something different. I bought this by accident because of a marketing ploy that probably shot Hatfield in the foot: The blurb is very careful not to mention the gender of Mad Dog. I, like probably the majority of people, did not read it carefully and made an assumption that Mad Dog was male. This mean to me that this was a M/M thriller.

The reality is that Mad Dog is female and this is a M/F romance. Now the audience for a book about two men chasing a killer is not the same audience as for a het romance thriller.

But I read it anyway because Mad Dog is a strong, intelligent, capable cop. She copes with loss and a challenging case very well. Oh wait, then the story starts.

Mad Dog ends up back home on a very non-Washington State type of farm. I mean, people are constantly being offered mint iced sweet tea. That is so Southern and so not Northwest. She's hanging around doing nothing for a long time while all the men are working hard. When danger erupts, the other woman gets sent away, but the men stay. At one point a strong woman comes for a couple of days and helps but then she is sent away, too.

When Mad Dog is introduced, we're told that "she wasn't going to pursue a career typical for most females". And what would that be? Does she mean a career that tends to have a lot of women or that women gravitate to? The way it's written just sounds like she's something really special because she decided to become a cop, like it's a freaky thing. Following that sentence is this one: "She was good at analyical thinking, problem solving, and reasoning." Now, that sounds to me that she was smart so she needed a non-female type job. At another point she pretends she can't shoot in order to get a man to come closer to her and show her how. To her credit, she doesn't let the ruse last more than an hour or two, but still, ewwwwww.

As I said before, the solution is obvious, but Mad Dog is an idiot as are all the people working on the case. I had a good idea who the killer was in Chapter One and I swear I'm not exaggerating..

The same formulaic stuff was here but it was different from the M/M romances I usually read. Not only don't the two main characters sleep together, they don't do anything more than kiss. At one point, he finds out she has a mole on her backside (it comes up in the case). He asks to see it and she says, "What kind of girl do you think I am?" The mole is "very low" on her back. Not her butt, on her back. This is a homicide detective--she's seen it all. This is a homicide detective from Seattle--one of the most liberal cities in the country with one of the lowest marriage rates and highest in other sins because there aren't that many religious conservatives here.

She's supposed to be driven, hence the "mad dog" nickname, but she goes to her family's farm to recuperate? Really? What homicide detective whose been working on the same case for three years, who has a personal stake in it, who was not ordered off the case, would go home a 4 hour drive away to hang out for the entire summer? One of the things she sets out to do when she gets there is learn how to cook. She spends most of her time indoors in the kitchen or looking at the same case info over and over.

Oh, and the very end? (This does not reveal the killer, just the epilogue: She gets married right away, quits being a detective, and goes to raise babies on a small farm in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing wrong with living on a farm--I would love to live on one. There is nothing wrong with being a farmer, and I'm sure there's a lot of intelligence needed. But for someone who excelled at being an urban homicide detective and loved her job, I find it a lot less than probable that she would be happy. I also think it's rather sexist.

The thriller stuff is generally a page or two long each time after the opening scenes. (And not very many of them.) Like a car chase (where the detective tries to evade the person chasing them rather than calling hte Sheriff for help to catch the guy!!!!) Lasted a few paragraphs. Boring.

My last quibble is that some computer geeks figure out that someone installed software on a phone that does something very specific (and bad) without having the phone to look at! There are some things you might be able to figure out, but not this thing. But I'll excuse it as being creative license. Lazy but okay.

So basically, this is a mediocre romance with a mediocre thriller aspect. But I do have to say, as sexist as I thought it was, it was ten times better than the average one I've read. So, I'll give it 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 because WHAT COP RUNS FROM A SUSPECT?!?!? ( )