Line of Fire is Jo Davis’s fourth book in her series about the men and women of Fire Station Five. It not only gives us the story of Tommy Skylar, the glamour boy of the outfit, but sets up the story for Sean Tanner, whose story will be told in the next book in the series. 

Tommy Skylar is tall, blond, handsome, charming and all that is hot and sexy. He works as a firefighter at Station Five in Sugarland, Tennessee. Tommy didn’t start out to be a firefighter – he was a shoo-in for a pro football career, but he quit college after his brother was tortured and killed in Afghanistan. Tommy became a firefighter to prove to his parents and himself that he could be a hero. He’s good at his job, but lately he’s been realizing that fighting fires is just a job to him – not a calling like it is to the others in the station.

When Tommy is injured during a rescue at a scaffold collapse, he runs into nurse Shea Ford. Tommy has been wanting to go out with Shea for some time now, but to his annoyance she keeps blowing him off in favor of dating Sugarland’s city manager Forrest Prescott, but (since we have to get the lovers together) Shea realizes she doesn’t even like Forrest and gives Tommy a chance. Fireworks explode between them.

While Tommy’s love life has been heating up, there’s been a series of mysterious arson fires in Nashville and Sugarland which baffle the arson investigators. Tommy talks to one of them and realizes that this is what he really wants to do with his life, but when the station is called to a warehouse fire, Tommy is badly injured and loses the use of his right hand. It turns out that the fire provides just the clue that’s needed to break the arson ring, but can they get to the bad guys before they get to Tommy?

Romances featuring firefighters are one of my weaknesses. I’ve read quite a few of them, some good, some not so good. Line of Fire can be summed up as a good/bad book. The good is the sheer verve and liveliness which which Davis tells the story. By the second page, I didn’t want to put it down. The bad is just about everything else.

Take Tommy and Shea’s relationship. She refuses to date him due to a Terrible Incident from her past, but once she decides to give him a chance, they boink in many and various ways (including anal – bleah) and decide they looove each other. She confesses the Terrible Incident and voila! It no longer bothers her!

Tommy wallows in guilt because his brother was killed while he was away at college and he thinks his mother blames him. They have a heart to heart talk and voila! Everything is beer and skittles again. Tommy is Mr. Sensitive Communicator for most of the book, then when he is injured, he cruelly turns Shea away for her own good and wallows in misery until the guys from the station come over and give him a much needed ass kicking. Then he goes over to Shea’s house, and she forgives him on the spot. Sigh. I wanted a major grovel.

The villains (there are several of them) turn out to be cogs in a big terrorist machine led by a nasty piece of work who will show up in the next book Ride the Fire. That book will feature Sean Tanner the station captain who has just gone through rehab and has demons from his past to exorcise. Yes, I’ll read it. I’ve gone this far and I want to see what happens next.