TAINTED HERO

Author: Michael W. Davis ISBN: 9781897445396 1/2008 CONTEMP/SUSPENSE Publisher: CHAMPAGNE BOOKS

As a decorated Army Ranger, Eric Emerson is honor bound to defend the helpless, and trained to survive against a ruthless enemy, yet these skills were useless to protect his family from a faulted legal system. Riddled with guilt, he's torn between his combat training and the rules governing society. The conflict shatters his marriage, his job, and his sanity, until Samantha Cassidy saves him from his anguish. Together, they unravel clues about a secretive Pentagon study and become targets from those determined to hide the truth. Sam and Eric share their secret past and disclose their feelings for each other. With Sam's help, Eric is able to vanquish the turmoil of his past, until he confronts Senator Robertson, sponsor of the Osiris study. The revelation about Osiris demands a horrific choice: ignore what they've found or become the seed that effects mankind's survival.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

I have a lot of mixed feelings about TAINTED HERO. On the one hand, I found the emotionally scarred Eric and vulnerable Sam to be both sympathetic and interesting characters—at least, at first I did. But later on, as Eric becomes a Charles Bronson-type vigilante he became much less so to me. It's one thing to have a leading character do the eye-for-an-eye scenario to someone who really deserves it, but it's another when he does it using extreme violence, all the while showing little or no emotion or remorse.

Also, there are so many antagonistic scenarios and ongoing subplots between Eric and many of secondary characters that it sometimes overwhelmed me as a reader, making TAINTED HERO read slower because the focus was spent more on trying to keep all the ducks in a row than on getting to know the characters in depth. In other words, the plot became a bit too "busy". A little less "busy" and a bit more character development would have aided in both fleshing out the players as real people and increasing the book's reading pace.

Overall, however, Mr. Davis does a very credible job in writing this contemporary suspense-filled novel. TAINTED HERO is more about military secrets, covert operations from high up and a man's struggle to rebuild his life after serving amid the chaos of the war in the Middle East, than it is about a love story, which is pretty much told on the side. This isn't a problem, really, since both Eric and Sam have extra baggage to deal with before a serious relationship between them can begin. There's also a lot of military jargon throughout TAINTED HERO. For those who are fans of authors such as Suzanne Brockmann or Marliss Melton, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. But I must admit that even with having a son in the military, I found some of that jargon-filled dialogue a bit distracting and not always easily followed.

TAINTED HERO by Michael W. Davis is a good, solid debut book for a writer who shows great potential and a real talent for writing suspenseful contemporary novels.

Nancy Davis