The Heat is On

Title: The Heat is On
Author: Helen Louise Caroll
Cover Artist: Trace Edward Zaber
Publisher: Amber Allure
Amazon:
Genre: Paranormal M/M
Length: Novella/20K Words/90 PDF pages
Rating: 4.25 stars out of 5

Review Summary: I didn’t know if Hunter would burn Christian with his fire or if Christian, the ice man, would put out the flames.

THE BLURB

Hunter Babineaux is a man of fire. The hot Cajun can start an inferno with a single thought.

Christian VanValkenburgh is cool and collected. The frosty New Englander can stop a psychic in his tracks.

Teaming up in a summer resort town to locate an untrained and potentially dangerous pyrokinetic child, the two men discover that opposites attract…in the hottest of ways…

THE REVIEW

I must confess that I really like this author’s paranormal stories and The Heat Is On is the third such book she’s written that I have reviewed. I enjoy the intensity that she brings to her characters  and the way they connect with each other. Like her other paranormal stories, she did not disappoint here.

The book opens with an extraction that almost went wrong and the situation was one where Hunter was at his best, racing against the clock to save a life. An adolescent female telepath had been involved with a small time drug dealer who used her for his criminal activities, and Hunter was up against a dangerous gang as he searched for his target whom he had to save before she was killed.

When he returned to the Claremont Foundation he wasn’t given any down time to recover – almost immediately he was sent on another life and death assignment to save an unstable pyrokinetic teenager before he unintentionally killed someone. However he had a partner along for the ride this time, a man he had dreamed of having in his bed, but he didn’t want him on this mission  since he was inexperienced in field work and he would be a distraction Hunter could not afford. He had always thought of him as being cold, but Christian VanValkenburgh proved to be a very different kind of man with an ability that blew away all of Hunter’s misconceptions.

This author has a knack for writing paranormal stories that keep me engaged until the very end as her plots have unusual elements that make old tropes new again. In The Heat is On the two protagonists, men in their forties, were on an an assignment that was physically taxing and mentally draining, and in the middle of it they had to battle their attraction for each other that had been simmering for a while.

Christian had many secrets and it took some time for Hunter to realize what a complex person he was. He always thought of him as the buttoned-down professional who was the Administrator of the Foundation. In reality because he was illegitimate he always felt that there was something wrong with him because of his father’s failure to acknowledge him and give him his name, almost as if he was unworthy of anyone’s affections.

Hunter grew up in Louisiana and I thought it was a great strategy on the part of Helen Louise Caroll to give him a Cajun patois whenever he was stressed or emotional. He had had a troubled childhood after his parents abandoned him at 12 because they were afraid of him, and he was saved by the Claremont Foundation which rescued him. The Foundation’s training academy, the Byrne School, worked with psi kids and adults and taught them how to control their abilities and placed them where they could use these abilities for good rather than harm. Hunter had distanced himself from other people over the years because he had been hurt and he wasn’t interested in relationships, until Christian.

The dark and gritty atmosphere of the locations was used to hype the tension in the story and emphasize the danger of the rescue. Whether it was through the use of firearms, the weather, or the added complication of an explosion which brought the heat up to boiling point, or just the overtaxed emotions of a teenager who couldn’t manage his new abilities and was rebelling against being made to feel like a freak, the strategy worked for me.

The pacing was fast, the characterizations shone including Robby’s parents who were unraveling because of the potential and real damage that Robby caused since he couldn’t control his gift. As for Christian and Hunter, I could imagine them riding on their Harley Road King Classics eating up the roads on the Michigan side of Lake Huron, arriving just in time for the Bluegrass Country Festival. The attraction was as hot as Hunter when his control over his pyrokinetic ability slipped,and he and Christian created beautiful fire together. I loved how Christian’s personality changed as soon as he was out of his formal suits. He and Hunter were an incendiary match and I wondered who would go up in flames first and who would quench the fire, as Christian fell into the pull of Hunter’s attraction and longed to give in to the heat to see how hot the fire would burn or if he could put out the blaze.

The only problem I had with this book was related to a couple of name switches which took me out of the story briefly, but the rest of it was exciting and imaginative and I went along for the ride. One more thing: I loved the music track for this book and I ended up playing all the songs because they happened to be old favourites of mine and I’m still playing them. 🙂 One character I hope to see in his own story is Charles Claremont who was beyond funny.

If you like paranormal stories and wonderful three dimensional characters who are a little older than twenty somethings, I would definitely recommend The Heat is On which was hot, intense, exciting and a lot of fun.