This is the first book by Justine Dare I’ve read; it’s the sequel to Dangerous Ground. Dangerous Games was good enough for me to seriously think about hunting up the other one. Which is not to say I haven’t got a nit or two to pick, but overall it’s an engrossing tale of intrigue and what happens to a covert operator when the past he’s left behind returns to jeopardize his future.

Lake McGregor (gee, any relation to all those other McGregors in the romance genre) was a member of the Wolf Pack, a quartet of behind-the-lines paramilitary types who did the dirty jobs the government needed to do but could not take care of in the open. He’s returned to Jewel, the Colorado town where he grew up, because word has reached him that his father Colin is dead. Led by his sanctimonious mother, the whole town drove Lake out when he was seventeen and had killed his little brother in an accident – and they haven’t forgotten or forgiven him. Art has always been a cathartic experience for him; it’s how he cleanses his soul and tries to put what he’s done into perspective. But he’s stunned to find one of his most powerful paintings hanging in the window of an upscale gallery, and confronts the owner about it.

Alison Carlyle has lived in Jewel since her husband died five years before. Not an artist herself, she does have an ability to showcase talent, and the gallery is her creative outlet. She’s been intrigued by the painting and, her assistant insists, half in love with the man who did it, ever since Colin McGregor gave it to her. Along with the canvas, Colin handed her the terrible secret of his son’s past – one even Lake doesn’t know – and instructed Alison to pass it on to him if he ever came back to Jewel. Lake’s intense reaction to seeing his work displayed in public shakes Alison to the core, but she’s intrigued: what demons would drive a man to put so much of himself on canvas in such a powerful, moving fashion?

Someone has been trying to wipe out all the members of Wolf Pack for some time, and the menace follows Lake to Jewel. As he finds himself drawn to Alison, Lake struggles against their mutual attraction, knowing that proximity to him is dangerous and life-threatening. But they can’t help themselves – she needs him to live again, he needs her to begin living. The danger mounts as the threat moves ever closer. Can Lake stop it before he loses what he never dreamed of having? How can she accept him, given his past and the horrible things he’s had to do?

It was a little hard to get into the story, but once I did, it turned into a non-stop reading marathon. The story works on both levels, as a romance and as a tale of intrigue. Lake and Alison are both fully drawn, with layers to their personalities. The cast of secondary characters is wonderful, and there’s a charming side romance between Alison’s assistant and the shy sheriff. The author does a good job of portraying the sometimes-claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business and outsiders are accepted slowly, if at all. And the villain’s sociopathic personality comes across loud, clear, and chilling.

Now, about those little nits. The first has to do with military terminology: Dare continually mixes up “Special Forces” and “Rangers” – they are two completely different animals with totally separate missions and tactics. The Rangers are part of Special Operations, but they are decidedly not part of Special Forces. Rangers: black berets; Special Forces: green berets. Given Lake’s involvement in covert operations, I would say he was part of the Green Berets. The constant confusion of these terms detracted from my personal enjoyment of the book.

The second nit, more pervasive, has to do with the author’s style. Dare, an otherwise solid writer, has a propensity for sticking subordinate clauses in between the subject and verb, as in “His peripheral vision, always excellent, told him it was Ray’s marked unit.” The occasional use of this structure, while OK if used sparingly, can become grating. (See what I mean?) She also has a tendency to build paragraphs out of a string of choppy half-sentences, such as “That he was behind all the vandalism. Worse, that [the villain] knew about Phoenix. That that was why he was here.” It’s an effective technique when building tension, but overuse dulls its edge somewhat.

That said, I encourage all lovers of romantic suspense to read Dangerous Games. The showdown at story’s climax is riveting – and I mean the resolution of both plot elements, the romance and the intrigue. This was another book I raced through to get to the end, and I think you will, as well.