Julie Garwood Slow Burn

Slow Burn

Julie Garwood

Ballantine, Sept 200, $25.95, 353 pp.

ISBN 0345453840

After returning home to Silver Springs, South Carolina, Kate MacKenna has troubles starting when she attends a party given by Carl Bertolli. As she nears the food tent, a bomb goes off. Kate is okay. The next frightening thing to happen is that Kate's best friend Jordan found a lump in her breast and wants Kate there for the biopsy.

She immediately takes the first plane to Boston and finds herself having sex with Dylan, Jordan's sexy police detective brother. She leaves Boston without seeing him again and is almost run over by someone in the parking lot. She is then lured to a warehouse where a bomb goes off. Jordan sends Dylan down to keep her friend safe. Both Dylan and the local police believe someone is targeting Kate but to her knowledge, she has no enemies and wants nothing more than for him to go back home. He is determined to see she remains safe because the ladies man has met his match in Kate. They learn that her great uncle left her $80 million dollars, money that her three greedy male cousins expected to inherit. Some people would kill for that kind of inheritance; her cousins have eighty million motives to kill Kate.

Nobody can doubt that Julie Garwood is one of the best romantic suspense writers today. Her heroine is feisty, vulnerable and independent while Dylan is protective, caring and determined to make Kate admit her feelings for him. Some of their discussions are truly funny and gets the reader sidetracked from wondering which one of the cousins or their associates want Kate dead. SLOW BURN is a fantastic and exciting romantic thriller.

Harriet Klausner