Even in Flashpoint, Sophia told Decker that he was in love with Tess and yes, Decker was in love with Tess. There’s a reason why Nash would always throw to Decker face, about him being in love with Tess. Decker would deny it all the time, but he was in love with Tess, but didn’t go there, because Nash went there.

Decker found Dr. Jo attractive.

I know that some people wanted Decker to wind up with Sophia. That’s why a lot of people are against Dave. They don’t like Dave. They don’t see him as hero material. Well, Dave has been a hero since Flashpoint.

If Decker truly loved Sophia, he would have made sure he seen about her in Into The Fire, before going after the bad guy. Sam would have saved Alyssa first. Nash would have saved Tess first.

Decker was a little hurt that Sophia moved on.

IMHO, Sophia always had feelings for Dave. She always found him to be attractive. In Flashpoint, she stated that he was going to be her second husband, no make that her third husband. In Into The Storm, while in that cave, she wanted to kiss Dave as badly as he wanted to kiss her. They both were feeling something towards one another in that cave. I know that some people disagree, but it’s there. Even in Into The Storm, when Sophia went rescue Dave and Decker from their wreck, she was more concerned about Dave. She even gotten mad at him for not telling her that he has been hurt as well.

There’s no excuse in my eyes, why Decker wouldn’t want to be around the woman he loves. He wasn’t in love with Sophia. He even made that known in Dark of Night.

I don’t believe that Sophia is still in love with Decker. Which, to me, she was in love with “Decker the hero” and not “Decker the person.”

I just don’t find the Dave/Sophia HEA believable or even enjoyable to read. If Sophia and Decker were not going to end up together I think both of them finding other partners outside the TS world would have been a more engaging story.

But it’s good that some people out there liked it. Because there is nothing worse then reading a romance and hating the main couple.

Shalladog, I feel the same as you do, there’s way too much happening in her books now, it’s overkill. Which is too bad, and it’s a bit of a trend I think. JR Ward does the same thing, along with Robyn Carr. I wish these authors would listen to just a tiny bit of reader feedback because so many readers out there feel the same as I do. Even when people like the books in this latest ’style’ they always, always point to the author’s earlier works when naming their favs.

Yes, it was probably more hero worship and gratitude than true love, but still.

And Dave was there when Sophia was rescued. Dave saw her scars when they were still fresh. Dave saw her, still shell-shocked, right after that clash with Decker. That’s a lot of baggage to bring into a relationship.

I do believe they’ll (Dave and Sophia) will work it out, but in a way it’s easier for Tracy and Decker, since they are beginning with a cleaner slate, so to speak.

Growly, while I don’t completely agree with your take, I’m glad I could help–even in so peripheral a way.

I still like her books, I just tend not to buy them anymore, if I do, its not in hardback…

Sophia and Dave will stick together longer since they have a reason, but Dave’s justified insecurity and inability to believe that Sophia loves him and Sophia’s ‘I love him because he is there and he loves me’ BS will ruin their relationship eventually, screwing up the folks around them.

If Brockmann felt Sophia/Decker wasn’t going to work due to their baggage (which I can see), it would have made much more sense to me to find them new non-baggage partners; and I felt Dave deserved much better.

This book felt like a total redaction of all characters. I was laughing at Sam’s relationship advice, too, in disbelief.

And at Dave the super agent. I did find a couple mentions in earlier books that said he was a much better agent than he looked at TS, but sorry, a guy who has sex for the first time in his 30s with a woman who’s out to kill him and gets an STD in the bargain is not James Bond… so that whole conflict she manufactured for Sophia just felt off.

I can see how the relationships in this book might work for folks who read this as a standalone and didn’t see how these characters acted and interacted in the last 7 books. However, I didn’t recognize any of them and this book was a continual ‘huh, really?’ for me.

I didn’t read any of these books for the suspense plots and this one is indeed even more implausible than any earlier books, but since I only read it because I wanted to see if she could make me believe in the Sophia/Dave and Tracy/Decker thing, that part didn’t bother me all that much. It does go into the minus column though and this book has many.

My biggest issue was that I just didn’t care. I got to chapter 2 and I put it down for 2 weeks because I was just bored. I had to force myself to make it through the first 100 pages, but then the story did pick up for me and I finished the rest in a day.

After I finished it, I kept feeling that there should have been more, that the book wasn’t finished and I think that has to do with the fact that the main action is 4 days and then a couple short ‘tell’ sections which comprised another 5-6? weeks, when I felt such a drastic left turn in the main relationships should have been developed over months at the very least.

While others find her long story arcs to be innovative romance, to me they have gone beyond romance and I’m just not willing to follow, especially since I originally felt she was trying to pull one over on her fans with these new pairings. My main reason for thinking that was that she’s too good an author to have been this bad at planting seeds and foreshadowing through the 6 earlier books in this arc.

Now I think she didn’t lie to us, she lied to herself… because it’s plain sad if an author has to rewrite multiple characters from her earlier books to try to make a new development plausible and even so fails.

It really is too bad, because as much as I don’t believe in the HEAs for S/D and T/D, Brockmann left me with a 24 hour buzz in which I wanted to read more about these people and there’s that little voice that wants to know what happened to Izzy and Eden…

Thanks for writing your review, AL. I’d been mulling these things trying to formulate my thoughts for my LJ reaction, and now it’s all in writing, so I can just copy and paste it there!

Personally, I think that comment makes it impossible for me to believe that Sophia is truly in love with Dave, to the depth that he is with her.