Book Review: Hostile Intent by Lynette Eason

Hostile Intent (Danger Never Sleeps #4). Lynette Eason. Fleming H. Revell Company (2021). 320 pages. Genre: Suspense, Christian Fiction.

First Lines: "Beginning of April. New Mexico. Today, the watching ended and the killing started."

Summary:  FBI Special Agent Caden Denning has seen many crime scenes during his career, but this is one of the most difficult.  An entire family has been murdered. As he and his partner are searching the house for clues, he comes across a photo of Ava Jackson as a child.  Ava and his sister, Sarah, have been best friends since they were children.  But why is there a picture of Ava in this home?

Ava Jackson left the military when her mother got ill.  She had lost her father a few months earlier and is not willing to let her mother suffer alone.  She spends several hours each day at the nursing facility where her mother lives.  Caden Denning often visits her there.  When he shows her the picture he found at the crime scene, she is stunned.  She remembers the picture, but didn't know the family that was murdered.  As Caden and Ava begin looking for a connection between the murdered family and Ava's, they discover there were a lot of things Ava didn't know about her dad.  Will they be able to discover the killer before another family is murdered?

My thoughts:  This was a thrilling finale to the Danger Never Sleeps series.  Each of the books in the series has been a page turner filled with interesting characters.  However, I think this one was my favorite.

I really liked Ava as a character.  She is smart and talented, but not overly sure of herself.  Her dad was a travel writer and was often gone for weeks at a time.  So when he was home, Ava liked to spend as much time as possible with him.  They often worked on jigsaw puzzles together, not because Ava wanted to, but because this was a favorite pass time of her father.  Because of this, Ava became very good at solving puzzles of all kinds.  She eventually became very skilled at computers. Her father also taught her how to defend herself.  That, combined with her military training, makes her quite capable of defending herself.

Ava and Caden become closer as they work together to catch the killer.  As is always the case in Eason's books, the romance never takes over the story, but is just a background thread.  There were lots of secrets to uncover, but their combined skills and areas of expertise made all the difference.  There were lot of surprises, complications and injuries along the way.  I enjoyed being immersed in the world of puzzles, hacking and figuring out how a criminal thinks. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this hard-to-put-down book.  There are some heavier topics covered - serial killer, suicide, torture - however the descriptions are never graphic, but are dealt with realistically while keeping the overall tone light.  This could be read as a stand alone without missing too much, but I would highly recommend the entire series.