Review: Keep Her Safe

Do you ever get tired of me saying that I absolutely adore K.A. Tucker and her books? Because I'm going to say that again: I love her and her novels. Keep Her Safe is her latest and is an interesting (and well done) mix of suspense and romance. I didn't want to stop reading!

Here's the synopsis:

Noah Marshall has known a privileged and comfortable life thanks to his mother, the highly decorated chief of the Austin Police Department. But all that changes the night she reveals a skeleton that's been rattling in her closet for years, and succumbs to the guilt of destroying an innocent family's life. Reeling with grief, Noah is forced to carry the burden of this shocking secret.
Gracie Richards wasn't born in a trailer park, but after fourteen years of learning how to survive in The Hollow, it's all she knows anymore. At least here people don't care that her dad was a corrupt Austin cop, murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. Here, she and her mother are just another family struggling to survive...until a man who clearly doesn't belong shows up on her doorstep.
Despite their differences, Noah and Gracie are searching for answers to the same questions, and together, they set out to uncover the truth about the Austin Police Department's dark and messy past. But the scandal that emerges is bigger than they bargained for, and goes far higher up than they ever imagined.

I was expecting Keep Her Safe to be especially twisted but I didn't find I was on the edge of my seat as much as I was with He Will Be My Ruin (my review is here). That doesn't mean it wasn't suspenseful though. I had a pretty good idea of what happened to Abe - Grace's father - but (and this is an important but) Tucker threw in a twist at the end that I didn't really see coming and, holy cow, does it ever deliver an emotional sucker punch. I found that it was in the end that you realize how dark and messed up the story really was. 

I was drawn into the story from the start and hated putting the book down. (Which is especially hard when I started reading it at lunch at work and only have half an hour to eat and dive into a story.) It was a well-written, riveting story, and had characters that I really liked and cared about.

Speaking of characters, Gracie was awesome. She has such a tough outer shell because of how she had to grow up - in a trailer park, with no father, and a mother who's a drug addict. She's understandably wary of Noah (who is also amazing and he is my first book boyfriend of 2018) but isn't so completely hardened that she can't realize how their feelings for each other are changing. She was such a fascinating character and wicked smart and I wish I could read more about her.

I think this book is being marketed as a romantic suspense and I hope that neither romance nor suspense fans are turned off by the categorization. It's not a cheesy, forced romance and it's a really good mystery. I think fans of both genres would really enjoy this one because I think it's a perfect balance of the two.

I'm so happy that there's another K.A. Tucker book out in the world and I hope those who haven't discovered her books yet will with Keep Her Safe. This one will definitely be on my list of books to push on people for the rest of 2018!

*An ARC was provided by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*