As far as I’m concerned, the kooky faux-Bridget Jones heroine is a trend that has gone on far too long, particularly in romantic suspense. In the name of gender equality and anti-misogyny, we have heroines running around like headless chickens – clueless, dumb, and unrestrainedly propelled towards disaster. How refreshing and how relieving it is to read a book that is unabashedly sane.

The only touch of generic in Ms. Denison’s otherwise rational book is the secret agent gang, here called The Reliance Group and based in Las Vegas. If you guessed that they’re a private organization that takes cases no one else does, and that all the members are going to get their own story, and that the group’s leader is a super-good-looking, mega-taciturn guy who is so gonna get it from Ms. Sassy Reliance Agent – if you guessed all that, don’t let it stop you from reading Into the Night.

Because other than the generic idea of an ultra-secret group of mega-hotties, I quite liked this first book in Ms. Denison’s new series. It isn’t perfect (more on that later), but in some important ways Into the Night is romantic suspense done right. The subject matter isn’t easy to read: At the center is a man who indefensibly and horribly exploits girls and women, and our heroine, Nicole Hutton, has personal reasons for wanting to expose Preston Sloane. This was a fork in the writer’s road: Ms. Denison could have made our reporter heroine impulsive, reckless, and thoroughly unlikable. Instead, Nicole exhibits brains as well as beauty, and knows darn well when to stick up for herself, and when to defer to the expert.

That would be Nathan Fox, a member of The Reliance Group who is told to retrieve a colonel’s teenage daughter, now suspected to be ensconced on Sloane’s Nevada estate. Nathan meets Nicole at a speed-dating event that is utterly unrelated to later events, but that provides the first setting for their mutual attraction. Later, they meet again when Nicole infiltrates Sloane’s network, pretending to be a teenager, and Nicole convinces Nathan that he could use her; she’s right. On the personal side, Nathan is far more ready than Nicole to pursue a committed relationship; Nicole has issues to work through, but their relationship, and the sex scenes, progress very believably.

My admiration, though, more or less stymies there. I don’t have a lot of love for the book; it’s difficult when the distressing details are sometimes delivered with dry and impartial overtones, as if the character was temporarily inhabited by a determined orator on a soapbox. The novel is also curiously devoid of feeling, engaging the top layers of emotion but failing to penetrate the heart. Again, I attribute this to the prose, which doesn’t demonstrate the same spark and polish as the structure and plotting of the story do, and the result is that I sympathized with Nicole and Nathan, but I didn’t empathize with them.

Nevertheless, Into the Night is far from a bad book. Although I’m not ecstatic (and I wish I could be), I do recommend it as a basically solid romantic suspense, and I certainly would be glad to see Skye take the big stick up Caleb’s butt and beat him over the head with it.