Review: Moonrise

Moonrise by Anne Stuart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Night had already fallen—it came early in October, and the moon was beginning to rise, covering the area with a silver light. In the moonlight, fresh blood would look black. 

I'm going to get this out of the way right away, there isn't any romance in this story. I know this is classified as romance but Annie and James' relationship is love/hate, zero romance, think more teeth gritting than swoony. As I've talked about before, Stuart has my trust as a reader, so when her heroes cross my fiction world soft lines, I hang in there. Y'all, I lost count of the times Jame said or thought about killing Annie, I'm not talking about the “haha, I could strangle you” out of love/frustration we see more often in romance, more of the: 

He looked down at her slender, delicate throat, and thought about how much pressure he'd need to exert to break her neck. It would be simple, easy, no more than a flick of the wrist, and she and her questions would be no threat to anyone. 

He was either going to have to do his damnedest to convince sharp-eyed, quick-witted Annie Sutherland that her father was a harmless bureaucrat who'd died in a freak accident. Or he might have to kill her himself. 

 If someone was going to kill Annie Sutherland, then it ought to be him. 

"I ought to fucking kill you," he said furiously. "You stupid little bitch, if I had any sense I'd cut your throat and have done with it." 

That last line was said around the 85% mark, this was some stark stuff, folks. 

The man who knew the secrets. That's what her father had said years ago. If ever anything happened, anything questionable, she could go to McKinley for the answers, Win had told her in a rare burst of openness. 

Moonrise was a romantic suspense that was extremely slow and plodding with getting the mystery and suspense going. We're introduced to Annie who's father has just died and now after six months, Annie is finally coming out of the grief and questioning his death, she doesn't believe he fell down the stairs drunk and broke his neck. In a last letter to her, her father tells her to go to James McKinley if she ever needs help. James was her dad's sort of protege and she's known him since she was a kid and used to have a crush on him. What Annie doesn't know is that her father worked for the CIA and lead a covert group of men and women. James was one of those covert soldiers and is now semi-hiding out on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico. 

He just stared at her. "Told you what?" 

"What you do for a living. What my father had you do. He said they call you Dr. Death. Why?" 

"Because I'm fast, scientific, and relatively painless. And I make house calls." His voice was icy. 

Annie finds James with the help of her ex-husband Martin, who also worked for her dad and from there the story becomes a bit grid-locked with James constantly talking about killing Annie with the underlining sense that he is attracted to her and Annie begins to feel like a character in a daze just following along. The main suspense arc of finding out who and why Annie's dad was killed takes so long to get going and it isn't until the latter half of the book that there is actual movement and we start to get answers. James kills the people being sent after them, Annie is clueless, James wonders if he should just kill Annie, Annie is dazed by the little clues leading her to find James is a killer and her dad isn't who she thought he was, and some villain povs to try and keep the danger and mystery element alive, rinse and repeat this with a sprinkling of attraction and you have the story. 

"Fuck it," he said, more to himself than to her. "I've killed for you. I've earned you." 

The story structure just felt lackluster, the pacing was off and secondary characters and villains weren't always used correctly. There was a pretty bizarre scene where James and Martin talk, semi-argue about who is going to sleep with Annie to get her to trust them. It didn't fit because of how she already was trusting James and if it was included to show James did have feelings for her, it didn't completely accomplish that because of how awkward and uncomfortable the scene ending up feeling. When Annie and James end up in Ireland (James drugs her for the entire trip there, for some reason) their relationship starts easing into starting up, again, I can't quite call it a relationship with romance. Their sex scenes always had a whiff of non-consensual to them and after Annie tells James she loves him(?!?) it turns into this: 

She sat back on her heels, suddenly nervous, and he looked down at her. "Keep on, Annie," he taunted. "Show me how much you love me." 

There was that beginning whiff again that she was at first only going to give him head because she didn't want him to kill her. Stuart always plays with power dynamics in her books, I just think she missed more of the mark this time, for me personally anyway. 

He was furious with her for thinking he could kill her. 

If you couldn't tell, this was a dark and angst read but Stuart has humor in her books, it's usually gallows but it can be found in edges. After 80% of reading James spout off about killing Annie, he's angry that Annie thinks he really is going to kill her at the end. Besides the dark humor of it all, it was supposed to finally show James' love for Annie but these two just didn't have the growth journey I usually look for in emotional relationships; I started off thinking James loved Annie but didn't think he was good enough for her, I ended thinking he loved her the same. Annie's growth felt the same to me and we probably need to see the same psychiatrist for our love of fictional anti-hero men. She does get a couple licks in though with affronting James by guessing his age just a little younger than her father's and commenting in her thoughts on his thinning hair in the back of his head while he is napping. 

"What's going to happen to us, James?" she whispered. 

"We're probably going to die." 

There was a fair amount of the story told through flashbacks, too. I don't typically mind flashbacks but with the pacing already off, they didn't help matters, especially considering that one of the flashbacks had the most romance between James and Annie. Along with the non-romance happening between the main couple that could be hard for some to read, one of the villains uses a homophobic slur a couple times. The ending was also abrupt, especially in a more epilogue publishing era. This couple was the opposite of ooey-gooey make you swoony and even though I like teeth-gritting emotion, this was raw without the emotion.

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