Lisa Dodson

Good second chance story mixed with riveting suspense. The story opens as Colt is on a mission for the security company he works for, looking for information about arms trafficking. When he overhears something about auctioning a biotoxin, the mission quickly changes. Colt is injected with the drug when his team is attacked, leaving him only six days to live. Any hope of living rests in the hands of his ex-fiancée, Marina, if he can get to her in time.

Three years earlier, Colt abruptly ended his engagement with biochemist Marena without explanation, then disappeared from her life, leaving her devastated. Colt is the last person she expects or wants to find on her doorstep. He doesn't get a warm reception until he collapses at her feet, burning up with fever. She may still be hurt and angry, but she doesn't want him dead. As soon as she hears the details of the biotoxin, she springs into action to find the antidote to save him.

It won't be easy. Marena has been away from her former job for a long time but still has contacts in the business. Knowing that her formula was redesigned as a weapon gives her further motivation. The tension remains high throughout the book as Marena and Colt scramble to assemble everything they need. At the same time, the toxin continues to work its way through Colt's body, causing debilitating effects. I loved Marena's determination and her refusal to let Colt give up.

Unlike many other suspense stories, we know who is behind the attack on Colt and why. However, trust is in short supply, and there are some interesting twists as the story plays out. They agree on the need to find Colt and retrieve the information he took before the auction takes place. I could feel their frustration as their quarry stayed one step ahead.

I was on the edge of my seat as zero hour drew closer. Marena gets some unexpected help, enabling her to make faster progress on the antidote. Colt's condition worsens rapidly, leading her to take extreme measures. As readers, we can see the bad guys closing in, and the tension ramps up quickly. The final confrontation was intense, with surprising revelations and rapidly changing players. The resolution was a nail-biter, and I loved how it went down.

I enjoyed the rekindling of the relationship between Marena and Colt. Neither of them had stopped loving the other, but Marena was wary of trusting Colt with her heart again. Colt knows he made a mistake leaving her and is determined to mend their relationship. He finally confesses why he broke their engagement, and while I understood his reasons, his execution was faulty. He would have done much better talking to her about it first. The crisis brings them closer, though they do nothing about it until after everything is done. Even then, Colt holds back, determined to earn her trust first. Fortunately, he gets a kick in the pants that moves him along. Marena has also been holding back and gets a push from an unexpected source. I loved the ending. Colt was adorably flustered but managed to say what he needed to say. I loved Marena's response.

There are some interesting family dynamics in this book that play essential roles. Love, loss, and stubbornness create situations that have long-term consequences. I liked how the crisis brought people together and forced reevaluations of old arguments. Colt's parents and grandfather had a lot to overcome, but their love for Colt brought them together in the end. Marena's father's protectiveness was understandable if a little over-the-top, but even he could change. I liked Marina's brother, Lucas, and hope there will be a book for him - something about a woman named Alexa...

My only quibble with the book is that thirty-three years old is unrealistically young for a retired full colonel. It typically takes 21 to 23 years of service to reach the rank of Colonel. Colt would have most likely been a major at that age. Most military retirements only happen after you've put in twenty years of service (medical retirements not included).

#netgalley… (más)

Let's cut to the chase. The reason I did not rate this book higher is that it can get repetitive at times. The book also is a bit heavy on anecdotes, and to be honest, it goes more into effects and impact of poverty, which are important topics, than into the moral underground concept, which is the real reason I picked up the book. Now, don't let that fool you. This book presents some very solid research the author did over eight years, and it does include plenty of notes and documentation for those who want to go further. Do understand that names have been changed to protect people who often take great risks to help out their fellow human beings who happen to be poor and need a hand in a society that pretty much discards them. Anyhow, the book spends two-thirds of the content on the exposition of the poverty issue, and only towards the end does it get to the point promised in the title. After a while, you can skim some of it.

Now, leaving the negative I saw as a reader aside, this is a book that more people need to be reading. What I am afraid of is that the usual "poor blaming" and "victim blaming" crowds (you know them, the asshats who always say "if those poor people only did X and Y" and "why the hell do they keep breeding?") will probably glance at it, then toss it aside, minds already closed and made up. But they need to read this. Policy makers, educators, social workers, teachers, parents, all need to be reading this. Because when we think of poverty, we usually think of those who suffer it. The real issue, in addition to that, is the impact that poverty has on the rest of society. The poor do work, and they work hard. In their underpaid, often exploitative jobs they come across middle class people, their employers and managers, and this creates tension and strife. Some of these managers lack any sense of empathy or compassion in spite of the fact they are the ones who often enable an unjust system that does not even pay a living wage. But Dodson points out that there are some small points of hope: managers, supervisors, superiors, so on who see injustice and refuse to simply watch it happen. They show compassion and empathy, and they disobey the rules as need be because immoral conditions should not be tolerated. So, a manager might overlook a worker being late because of a mother having to take a kid to the doctor, or maybe said manager alters the time clock so she gets her full pay if the mother had to leave early for said doctor appointment. What conservative hypocrites fail to appreciate, and it is very well laid out here, is that minimum wage jobs not do not provide a living wage: period. For all their whining about "welfare moms" and other stereotypes of unemployed people, there are are tons of working poor, who have, you know, real jobs. And in their minds, work is what is supposed to lift them out of poverty and give them progress. Well, when you pay shitty wages that force someone to work two or even three jobs to make ends meet, other corners have to be cut. So, mom has to leave her child alone at home for a few hours because she cannot afford day care on the shit salary your slave job pays. Is that really neglect? It's either the kid or the job. Most middle class people would probably say the kid first, but they have the resources to buy child care as needed. Poor people often lack that option, and when they do, that situation does have ripples throughout the rest of society, something that most whiny right winger conservatives and libertarians fail to see.

So, a small, mostly invisible moral underground emerges where some folks with compassion do whatever they can to help out their poor workers and friends. Some of these managers do have compassion and hearts, and they see the plight of their workers. A doctor writes a prescription for an asthmatic patient, but puts it in the name of the aunt, for instance, because said aunt has health insurance, so the medication will be covered. Fraud? To the letter of the law moralists, maybe. But it's either that, or let a child go without life saving medicine. If I was that physician, I know my choice. Do you? And this kind of thing does happen all over the place. However, as Dodson points out, it is not visible. It is an underground. She had to do a lot of work and give a lot of reassurances to get some of the information. You see, people in the Moral Underground have certain mechanisms and knowledge in place, information they are not going to share with just anyone, if at all. In many cases, the best Dodson could do was just provide outlines of what some folks do, or mention they did something without giving any specifics so as not to disrupt a pipeline.

At the end of the book, Dodson does provide a plan, outlining what needs to change and happen for things to get better in order to have a truly fair economy for ordinary people. Overall, this is probably one of the best books I have read, and I do wish more people will read it.… (más)

After years of conducting focus groups and collaborative social research, Dodson wrote this book summarizing her findings. Mixing together anecdotes and US statistics on poverty, Dodson examines a country without universal health care, a livable minimum wage, or affordable care for children, the elderly, or the disabled. As Dodson says, poverty created and maintained at an institutional level is bad not only for the well-being of those in poverty but also harms everyone else in society. She breaks down the exact numbers of people's wages and bills, and presents the nearly impossible logistics required to raise children as a low-wage earner. She talks a bit about the strategies individuals have used to combat these structural problems, like allowing workers to have flexible shifts, "losing" diaper inventory, or letting uninsured patients use other people's insurance. She never gets in depth about these strategies for fear of making them more difficult to do, but it's still clear that even though she calls middle class individuals' efforts to ameliorate suffering due to poverty a "moral underground," there really isn't an "underground" in the sense of an organized network. From her descriptions, at least, it seems like it remains very disconnected and individual.

None of this is breaking news, but I like the way Dodson frames it all. I could feel her frustration biting through the numbers and her bland but leading questions to those who blame structural issues on individuals' work ethics.… (más)