Not your Average Bear...

OK, you guys know that I love me some Linda Howard. I think she is, hands down, the BEST romantic suspense writer going.  Her plots are interesting, her heroines are take charge, intelligent woman, her men are supremely ALPHA and her sex scenes are HOT!  I have read everything LH has ever written and although I love some more than others, there is nothing I would hesitate to suggest to a reader looking for consistently good stuff. I was crazy excited to hear, that after quite a wait, she had a new book coming out. The synopsis made it sound a lot like a vintage Howard, something along the lines of Up Close and Dangerous.  After her last few books, a few of which had sort of a southern chick-lit feel, I was looking forward to a return to the Howard I crave.  So did Prey deliver?  Um, sort of...

The premise of the books is pretty simple. Our heroine Angie Powell runs a hunting guide service out of her small Montana hometown. Angie is doing OK until ex Army stud, Dare Callahan sets up his guide service and steals away all of her business. Angie hates everything about Dare, even though she barely knows him and was very attracted to him upon their initial meeting.  Dare likes everything about Angie, especially her "world-class" ass. Yes, Dare is not the most sophisticated of Howard's men, but he is very cool and competent and super sexy. Just before she closes up shop, Angie signs on to take a couple of guys out on a bear hunt. Angie doesn't much like bears, but she needs the cash and isn't all that sure they will even find one, so off she goes. A mutual friend who is worried about Angie being up on the mountain with a couple of strange men asks Dare to keep an eye on her.  He agrees and heads up to his own camp, just to make sure all is well.  All is not well, as the two men Angie is working for turn out to be very dangerous. In fact one of them is a psycho killer.  As if that wasn't bad enough they do encounter a bear. A bear who, as it turns out, is also a psycho killer.  On top of dealing with psychos of both the human and ursine variety, Angie and Dare are caught up in a major storm and have to figure out a way to survive in really terrible physical conditions.  Interesting.  Right?  Great potential.  Absolutely. So why am I not raving about this book?  Because it just did not come together like a typical LH book.

My first problem was with the heroine. Angie is not a terrible person, but she seemed less intelligent and much more emotionally stunted than most Howard heroines. Her life was made up of a pattern of crappy decisions and her social awkwardness made her potential as a partner for the super cool Dare, seem unlikely. I usually love LH's heroines and Angie was so blah, I couldn't really get into her at all.  My second issue with the book involved the fact that the romance was way overshadowed by the man vs. nature stuff. It took over half the book for our heroes to hook up and start spending time together and then they faced terrible hardship, so the romance didn't feel as satisfying as the norm in a Linda Howard book. Ms. Howard spent so much time telling us what the villains were thinking and doing, that we didn't get to know the Hero/heroine as well as one might hope. Chapter after chapter we heard what the killer thought and felt.  Ditto the bear.  Yes, I said the bear.  For some reason, LH decided to try to get inside the head of the bear and provide readers with his thoughts and motivations. Yeah.  I know.  It just didn't work for me.  In fact, there was an episode with the bear toward the end of the book that I found downright off-putting.  I am no wuss when it comes to gruesome stuff, but the violence seemed really gratuitous. While I admire LH for not trying to turn the bear into some anthropomorphized cuddly stuffed animal sort, I just felt like she took the bear attack descriptions a bit too far. In a word, yuck!

So, here I sit, sort of bummed out. I had very high hopes for this book and it just did not work for me.  That said, have no doubt that I will be grabbing the next Linda Howard book as soon as it is published. This writer has provided some of the most enjoyable genre reading ever and I am not about to let one so-so book drive me away. I think that Howard is a victim of her own excellence.  She has written so many outstanding titles, I, and others, expect way more from her.  As I told a friend when talking about this book, if it was a Sandra Brown, I'd probably be raving about it.  I just expect more from Linda Howard.