Tara Janzen: On the Loose

On the Loose: C-


He's a special agent who never loses his cool.

She's the heat-seeking missle headed straight for his heart.

Keeping cool under pressure is the credo C. Smith Rydell lives by. That’s why he was handpicked by the Special Defense Forces for a mission few men survive. So why has the ex-DEA superstar been reassigned to Panama City, playing bodyguard to a blond in a black string bikini? Except Honey York isn’t your average pampered socialite. She’s the woman Rydell caught smuggling cash into El Salvador four months ago. And now she wants him to take her back.

All Honey has to do is find the guerrilla camp, deliver the goods, and get the hell out of the jungle—all in forty-eight hours. Only one man is up for the job. But sharing an unforgettable one-night stand was nothing next to being stranded with Rydell on some third world mountaintop. And with bullets flying and all hell breaking loose, now is not the time for passion. As if these two could possibly resist it….

I read this book for a book club and at the end of the book, I wasn’t sure if I really knew what the book was about. Tara Janzen continues her Steele street series with this seventh book and unsurprisingly, the number of plotlines and secondary storylines in the book were ridiculous.

Honey and her five Louis Vuitton bags need to get into El Salvador. She is working with the U.S. government in order to help her sister, who is a nun in an impoverished village in El Salvador. Her mission is to go in, give her bags to a drug lord named Alejandro Campos, who in return was to take her to the rebel group leader (Diego?) so that she can give him the 2million dollars and in return, retrieve an especially important USB flashdrive.

Along with this is an impregnated nun, a terrified but part-of-the-scene history teacher from the United States who records everything, and there’s the badass Russian Irena, C. Smith Rydell’s former lover, who is back to destroy Smith and Honey.

It is in the midst of this and crazy El Salvadoran downpour, that Honey and Smith realize their love for each other.

The one scene that they end up together is the one scene in the entire book that they have to themselves; all other scenes are riddled with planes, guns, nuns, rebels, and… no romance. It would be an understatement to state that there was no love and no romance in the book.

What On the Loose proved to be was a rebel-military-top US government-secret espionage and military combat book with one sex scene (where afterwards, the hero and heroine realize their love for each other).

Silly and convoluted plots rule this book and because of the convoluted plot, the first half of the book is a rocky read.