Kristie J’s review of Elusive (Shipwreck, Book 1) by L.A. Fiore
Romantic Suspense published by Amazon Digital Services 21 Jul 17
Wowzers! Now I don’t say this about every book – but Wowzers. This book really is about modern-day pirates and I don’t mean the Ethiopian kind. Nope, this is the swashbuckling pirates of old set in modern-day times. One pirate in particular with all the charm and charisma and ruthlessness of those pirates of old. An antihero hero who kills people, quite a number of people. When I started this book, this is not what I expected.
Do you know the song Bolero? It starts off slow and starts to build and build throughout the song as layers are added. The story opens with a ship’s captain writing a letter to his love, knowing chances are she will never get it because his ship is sinking.
The book then takes the reader back into the past and alternates between Willow’s and Kace’s POV. Willow is a lonely young woman. Her parents are described as modern-day Indiana Jones types and they are never there for her. She lives with her grandfather, but he also doesn’t have a lot of time to spend with her since he runs a museum. As a result, Willow lives in her mind a lot and has an extremely romantic soul.
Kace has it really bad. He was in foster care, but now he lives on the streets, foraging in dumpsters with his best friend, Snake, looking for food. The book has short vignettes of the two of them over the years until finally they meet. Kace is instantly taken with Willow when she gives a starving young girl a pineapple on the island they both find themselves on. Kace has seen very little human kindness in his life, so he is particularly drawn to Willow when he sees a glimpse into her heart. He arranges a meeting and they spend a passion-filled night together when they are separated for a number of years.
Kace has grown colder and colder over the years and become a true criminal, albeit one with an odd set of morals. He and Snake have gathered a loyal group about them as they travel the seas doing modern pirate type stuff. Finally, though, Kace is tracked down and shot, and, as a reader, I had a very hard time adjusting to his death.
Willow has never forgotten Kace, even though they spent so little time together. She herself has gotten into treasure hunting in the deep seas and teaching scuba diving to young children. She runs into a very attractive stranger, Noah, and for the first time since she spent time with Kace, she feels the same kind of attraction to a man as she did for Kace.
I’m not sure how much of this makes sense. As I said, this is a very multi-layered book as we go on. But this story really blew me away. I found it so hard to put down and stayed up way later at night than I should have and found myself almost late for work a couple of times, not wanting to stop reading. Willow is almost perfect as a heroine. There is not a single thing I would change about her and I could see why her memory stayed with Kace for so many years.
And Kace/Noah are perfect characters too. Noah is suave and debonair, but it is really just an act. His meeting with Willow is not by accident, he had been planning it for a long time.
When they meet, Willow has a deal for Noah. Over the years, she’s been searching for her own treasure, not for the money, but to see how things ended. The treasure is around the ship’s captain we see at the start of the book, and there are many layers to the mystery of what happened and what plans Noah and his crew really have.
I haven’t been reading a lot of romantic suspense lately, but this is such an excellent example of this genre. It has the perfect balance between romance and suspense and I Very Happily give it my recommendation. This first book is on sale for a very good price at the moment, so I’d say if this is a genre you enjoy, you simply must give Elusive a read.
Grade: A-
Summary:
I didn’t set out to be a pirate.
Life for me was about surviving the ugliness that people knew existed but didn’t talk about.
I lived in hell.
Then I saw her.
I knew I couldn’t keep her, but for just a little while I had found heaven.
Eight years later, I can’t get her out of my head.
It is a mistake sailing to her island.
It is a mistake reaching out to her.
She doesn’t recognize me. Or maybe she does.
Closure, it is all I’m after.
Then my past comes back to haunt me.
She’s thrust into my ruthless world. An angel.
A romantic who has a journal that leads to a shipwreck and a lost treasure.
She wants to find the ending to a love story that is over two hundred years in the making.
I want to help her find it.
I didn’t set out to be a pirate.
I didn’t set out to fall in love with an angel.
I did both anyway.
No excerpt available.
