I liked it, but it moved pretty slow. and the relationship between the two didn't seem all that warm and caring, which i understand he didn't want to cross a line because of his job, but still.

So this book is a 2.5 for me (hence the uptick to 3). I liked it, kinda. But I did feel that there was way too much going on inside the characters head and not a lot of action. There was also head hopping in scenes, which jarred me out of the story at times. It was an intriguing premise though and I did like the main characters, especially Hunter. :)

It was ok, but Hunter and Annie’s romance felt artificial to me. They didn’t act like they had known each other for a year, so it felt rushed and not believable.

This was a good story but nothing terribly special. While I loved both of the main characters, something was just missing. The author put so much work into the beginning of the book and it just feel short and sped through the ending. I was left wanting more at the end of the book and felt disappointed.

Title: Safe by the Marshal’s Side

Author: Shirlee McCoy

Series: Love Inspired Suspense/ Witness Protection

Chapters: 20

Pages: 215

Genre: Christian Romantic Suspense

Rating: 5 stars

U.S. Marshal Hunter Davis
Annie Delacorte
U.S. Marshal Hunter Davis is a by the book U.S. Marshal who had not intentions of ever bending rules or falling in love. That was until he meet Annie Delacorte in witness protection, and everything he thought he knew went out the window.
I really enjoyed this first book in the Witness protection series and I can’t wait to read the rest of them. This was the right combination of action, suspense and romance.

Actual rating 1.5 stars

Thoughts and Plot

This was a hard one. Hard because there was so much cheesy cliche going on. I'm used to some with anything Love Inspired, but this one had cheese oozing out of the pages.

My major issue with this book is the romance between the lead man and lady. So Hunter has been working on Annie's protection detail for well over a year when the story first starts. The whole time he's super professional to the point of being cold. Then suddenly he realizes that he's got a thing for Annie and her young daughter Sophia. Really? Took a year? The man goes from being an iceberg to a warm friendly dude in the matter of pages.

Annie does make a passing comment that she doesn't even know him after all this time (he tells he his favorite colour like that gives her an intimate look inside his head), but she quickly discards this notion in the last few characters of this book. Then it's full on love confessions and Hunter following her even as she dives into witness protection, which her parents conveniently decide to join with her in order to be together in a spur of the moment decision after not seeing her for over a year.

Sophia, Annie's 2 year old daughter? Yeah. You can remove her from the book completely I a bet you'd barely notice. She gets the writer's attention the way most dogs get attention in romance books. That is, almost not at all.

Another thing that gets me it that this book has the potential for lots of action and excitement, instead you follow Annie, day in and day out as nothing happens other then a few location changes.

Oh yes, someone throws a beheaded doll into the yard of the first safe house and sets a car bomb off in the garage of the second safe house, which is a condo way up in the building so the point at that was???? Oh and an un-detonated package has the doll's head in it on her lawyers front porch. Sound slightly exciting? Well it definitely isn't. Every time Annie is whisked away to safety before she's even in danger. The best you get is a brief wash over of these events and Annie jumping from a slow moving vehicle. Boring. And all of them are short lived.

This book spends so much time building up to the trial. So you think you'll read about them trying to get her safely to the court house and think maybe something will go wrong and get you some bloody action in this 'suspense' novel. NOPE!!! All of that build up and the hop right over the 20 day trial and have you land on the other side, event-less. Super lame. The climax wasn't even really a climax. More like a convenient way to wrap the whole thing up. I don't even remember if they said who was leaking the information or if it was covered under Hunter's convenient "we know who your boss is" speech to....Don.

Sigh. I honestly don't know why I finished this book. Oh and let's not forget all the HEAVY preluding to the additional books in the series...

In Conclusion

Safe by the Marshal's Side is a christian ...something (I didn't not find it suspenseful at all) bad romance. It was boring, and therefore it felt way too long. It wasn't exciting at all. I didn't believe the romance for a second. It had many a cliche. All in all I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone unless they wanted something to help them nod off. I'm thinking I'll be removing the rest of the series off my To Read list because the synopsis was the best part of this book. I'm so disappointed. All that potential, wasted.

Thankfully this story was only category length or I would have DNF after about the fifth chapter. What I liked: the hero (Hunter) was a great character both as an individual and part of the couple and I liked the other US Marshals that are on Hunter's team and their interactions with one another while doing the job. The kid was cute, but if the story didn't have the kid in, the story would have been exactly the same. I thoroughly disliked the heroine - what a whiny, naïve idiot who is still in love with her evil dead husband. She was more like a Christian version of a NA heroine. The religious aspect of the story was done with a deft touch for about 2/3 of the book and then it went into over load. But what I most hated about this book is that it ended on a cliff hanger and basically was used to set up the rest of the series (written by different authors about the same US Marshal team). This was not a complete story; the author dropped a plot twist about how this was bigger than the dead husband's gambling debts to the organized crime boss but would not say what it was about or how deep the dead husband's actions went to the bigger crime. The "I love yous" came out of the thin air real quick at the end.GRRRR....