Floodgates by Mary Calmes

 Tracy Brandt considers himself a lucky man. He has a wonderful family, good friends, and a dependable job. His love life, however, features a cheating ex who, though out of the house, is not yet out of the picture—with a past that just might get Tracy killed.

Homicide inspector Cord Nolan wants nothing more than to show his best friend’s little brother that he’s a reliable man, but to do that he’ll have to get Tracy to look past the player he used to be. It'll be a tough sell; reputation is everything, and Cord's is tarnished by his past indiscretions.

Tracy and Cord have spent five years trying to suffocate their fiery attraction under a blanket of grudging antagonism. When Tracy finds himself with a target on his back, Cord finally has the chance to ride to the rescue and break through the dam of Tracy's reserve. But he’d better be careful: if Cord is breaking the floodgates to wash away the past, he's going to have to hold tight to Tracy to make sure they're still standing when the tumult recedes.

Ummm. What can I say about this book? Good question. To be honest, this book could have been given as low as 2 stars just based on characters who had no depth. But the fact is, it became so silly it made me laugh. And the laugh was worth the 3 stars.

So, we’ve got Tracey, accountant, whose life seems like it could be snuffed out at any time. Seriously – in this story, he was almost murdered several times. First, by mafia types who were out to attack a certain individual – but OOPS, they hit the wrong place. Seems Tracey’s partner Deema (the spelling of the name might be wrong – I had the audiobook so I can’t check name spellings) has a brother who is high up in the Russian mafia and everyone seems to keep mixing up the two. Including everyone who knows and loves Tracey and wants him to quit working with Deema.

Now, that’s an important plot point because they bring out that Tracey’s a rather stalwart personality, trusting implicitly. Of course, as we see, over and over again, his trust keeps getting crushed. His boyfriend Breccan cheated on him twice that he found out about, once by walking in on the guy doing his best friend Sean on Tracey’s couch, and once he found out because he’d been attacked (remember he keeps getting almost murdered) and another person was attacked on the same day and as it turned out she was carrying Breccan’s baby. OOPS!

Now, considering the fact that Tracey has almost been killed by a guy who seems set on murder – he’d already murdered a former boyfriend of Breccan’s – one would expect that the cops, of which two of them are Tracey’s brother Alex and Alex’s former partner Cord would be all over Breccan. Instead, after Cord informs Tracey of this horridness, Breccan walks into the hospital room and Cord leaves them together. Uh, what? And uh, what again? Seriously, it’s obvious that Cord has a thing for Tracey and that Tracey likes, but distrusts him, back. (Tracey really needs to work on his trust thing. Trusting Breccan and not trusting Cord?) And yet, Cord leaves him with a man that I would have expected the police to be all over.

And to be honest, the book would have been more believable if the police had been all over Breccan and if Breccan had been the bad guy. I wanted Breccan to be the bad guy. It would have made sense to me. But no – he was just one of those guys who thinks sleeping around shouldn’t count against him. Instead, the bad guy ended up not showing up until the last minute. I so hate it when that happens. Plus, the bad guy shot Tracey point blank with a glock and there wasn’t a scratch on him? Uh…what?

To be honest, this is 7 hours and 53 minutes I won’t get back. And that’s just wrong. But I couldn’t give the story less than 3 stars, because it made me laugh. It wasn’t supposed to make me laugh, but it did. Cord kept up a stream of “I’ll protect you” and then would leave. And Tracey trusted implicitly when he shouldn’t. Add to that, he was kind of clueless. Of course, so was Cord. This was a case of the incompetent police inspector protecting the guy who was too stupid to protect himself. It was too impossible to believe not to laugh. And I laughed a lot.

And what’s even worse than losing this 7 hours and 53 minutes? I want to read Alex and Deema’s story next, because from the sound of this story, the author’s gonna match Tracey’s business partner with his brother. And won’t that be a match made with guns and bullets? Not to mention his clueless brother Evan who is adorable and at times quite spot on, but the rest of the time had his mind up in the clouds somewhere.

And if you’ve reached the end of this review, and wondered how my ratings scale doesn’t really match my ramblings and thought “that’s three minutes and twenty-two seconds I’ll never get back” well, you know how I feel. ;)

Story Rating: 3 stars

Narration Rating: 4 stars

Overall Rating: 3 stars

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