Customer Reviews

Pursuit (Jessica Ford Series)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

As several other reviewers have summarized the book very nicely, I'll be very brief - basically Jessica's boss calls her in the middle of the night telling her she has to go meet the First Lady. Jessica does this, but things go wrong when there is a horrible car accident that kills everyone (including the First Lady) except Jessica. The car accident is only the beginning of the trouble that now hunts Jessica and she has to decide who she can trust.

I have to say I enjoyed the book and read it very quickly. It was obvious to me who was the main bad guy almost from the beginning, but there was still the suspense of who was what side. While the story (especially the romance) sometimes felt rushed, it was still enjoyable. All in all, even though it wasn't the most believable book I've read, it was a good light read.

This novel is very reminiscent of her earlier novels. I thoroughly enjoyed it. In these times it was more believable than it would have been 20 yrs ago. The mystery was excellent and the romance was good. This is what a Karen Robards novel should be like.

Jessica Ford is a young lawyer working her way up in a dog eat dog world. She has decided she will do what it takes to get ahead at the prestigious firm where she is employed. Jessica comes from a working family and if it takes working 24 hours a day she will do it. The rest of her family is made up of gorgeous women including her mother, but Jess feels left out in the looks department she is small and wears glasses. Nevertheless, her brains and determination are better than most, and so when her boss calls late at night and asks her to pick up the first-lady and see her home in a limo, Jessica hurries out to the hotel to pick her up. Nothing goes right, the first-lady is drinking heavily and seems scared and determined to escape the surveilence of the Secret Service. The next thing she sees is a fire and feels unable to move toward it. Laying on the ground she is found by the head of Mrs. Cooper's Secret Service. The limo is totally destroyed by fire and everyone in it are dead except Jess. Jess is quarrentined from the press and almost as soon as she opens her eyes she sees a man dressed like the SS trying to inject something into her IV. She screams and rolls off the bed just as Mark Ryan runs into her room. No one believes her and she doesn't know who to trust. She remembers things that tell her the accident was no accident. But who to trust, and who to tell? Definitely not the SS.

Mark Ryan is the head of the SS assigned to the first-lady, Annette Cooper. He knows she has a drug problem, so he thinks the accident was due to her wanting to score some drugs. However, little things do bother him. He trusts the SS and they have never had a traitor working for them. He knows Jess is lying when she says she doesn't remember and so he will watch her closely. Then people around Jess and the first-lady start dying and Mark wants to know, what is going on? But the more he pushes her the more Jess doesn't trust him. Mark is used to covering up for the president and his wife and is determined that whatever happened, it will not touch the President or the SS.

The action is fast, the story is interesting, and I did enjoy it, very much. I recommend it highly if you enjoyed her earlier books.

I've come to the conclusion that Karen Robards would like to switch genres. If that's the case I wish she would just do it already! I'm tired of buying her books expecting the romance to play an equal part to the suspense, when, lately, it's just been an afterthought! She used to be able to combine the two beautifully but hasn't done it well since Night Whispers. (For you romance fans out there, I'd suggest going back and reading her old stuff, if you haven't already. You won't be disappointed.) I think part of the problem is she started writing books (like this one) that don't lend themselves well to believable romance. Pursuit is an apt title for this one because it was just that. Non-stop, beginning to end. The one small break they did have (towards the end) is where she decided to throw-in the one love scene. When that was over, so was the break. (I mean immediately!) These type of wall-to-wall action books are great for the suspense fans but not so much for the romance fans.

That being said, I did give this book 3 1/2 stars. (Amazon really needs to start allowing the 1/2 star ratings!) As little a part as the romance played, she still managed to create some chemistry between our hero and heroine, and the one love scene was pretty hot! And as for the suspense part, I thought she did great with that. She certainly kept me turning pages! It was an amazingly fast, fun, and exciting read. I just had one big beef with the character of Jess that kept me from really liking her and that was her vacillating between trust and distrust of the hero. It was completely believable at first, but after the guy has saved her life about 4 or 5 times, not to mention the many scrapes and jams he rescued her from, her constant wavering seemed ridiculous! But still, all-in-all, an enjoyable read! I just think she needs to take the plunge on over to strait-up suspense, as Tami Hoag did before her. (And Sandra Brown needs to do, also.) If we're not plunking our money down for romance we won't be disappointed!

I can't really comment on the book itself because I listened to the audio version and the narration was so awful that it was a constant distraction. The hero's voice was portrayed like he was an "old geezer" and other characters were equally as awful. What was the director of the audio production thinking of to let this happen?

I had an experience similar to the other reviewer who listened to the CD--or should I say, tried to listen. Everything that reviewer said is true. The reader sounded as if she was trying to swallow her words instead of project them. Although the story seemed interesting, I couldn't get past the reader's voice. Since the book got pretty good reviews, I may try to check it out of the library. But I will also pay attention to readers on future CDs to be sure to avoid this one!

Okay, it's official. I am crossing Karen Robards off my list of "authors to read." Once again, she has written a book that fails to convey any chemistry between the two main characters. Her idea of portraying attraction is when a "hero" notices that the "heroine" has a nice butt and that he calls her beautiful a couple times. She did a better job conveying the heroine's attraction for the hero, but not by much. The plot line has potential, but ends up being flat and boring. Even the so called "action" is boring! Sorry, to those die hard Robard's fans, but this book should not have ever been published! Shame on the editor!

I have read Karen Robards for years and have generally been glad I did. I have found her plots to be well thought out and satisfying and have spent many a late night reading them.
However, I found Pursuit to be dissappointing. The story starts out with the First Lady sitting in a bar. She somehow had eluded the Secret Service in escaping from the White House and while sitting in the bar and she called her long time attorney wanting to see him. Instead, he sends a subordinate attorney--more of a gopher really--to go to her and escort her out of the bar. Jessica Ford, that attorney, leaves her nearby home to meet the First Lady. Implausible you say? Definitely - but even if you're willing to accept that premise it only gets worse from there. I found the protagonist, Jessica, to be someone not to root for and I so wanted to do so. I wanted to get caught up in the story. She, however, was someone that I thought of as an idiot most of the time. In the story, there is a Secret Service officer, Mark Ryan, on her side which she alternately trusts and then doesn't--even though she is alone with him a good part of the book and he could dump her anytime. She constantly makes remarks that would make one want to slap her trying to she how smart she is. Ugh. The story read as if Ms. Robards wrote on the spur of the moment--that is, "well, I do not know what to do here so I will through this in." Hopefully, her next book will be better.

This book was very promising in the first few chapters. Then it just stalled, and the plot came to an almost complete halt. Hundreds of pages of the characters thinking and saying the same things over and over. The romance was completely unfulfilling and unbelieveable. The climax (no pun intended!) was disappointing. Take my advice: skip this one.

I was anxious to read this as it is a true romantic suspense. The basic story is full of intrigue. Mousy lawyer goes to assist the First Lady of the United States and wakes up the only survivor of a deadly car accident. The life of the First Lady is taken so the world is in chaos. The romance is between the survivor, Jess and hunky secret service agent, Mark Ryan, who was in fact the head of the First Ladies detail unit. The hook is, whether or not she can trust this guy, as everyone seems out to silence what she knows.

If you didn't notice, it took me a little longer to get through this book. Life and my own deadlines were part of this. Unfortunately the other part of it was that I just wasn't prompted to pick up the book. To be honest, the first fifty pages did well in setting up the story. I was rolling along, and along, and along, the next 100 pages drug on like a documentary. The book is 381 pages so we aren't even half way yet.

Then, finally it started to pick up again. I was able to focus on the book a little more out of pure necessity as I was traveling, but still, I was not so enthralled that I wanted to get to the hotel to read some more.

I did become pulled into the drama once the intended couple were finally focused on, although, I didn't feel the sexual tension as much as I would have liked. The love scene was sweet, heated, and brief. The pair went from being complete strangers to head-over-heels in love within a nano-second. Overall the book was well written but I found myself skipping ahead, bored with the explanations of the inner workings that led to the climactic end. I wanted there to be more heat, attraction, and or more of the couple. Which is funny because you are with the couple for almost the entire last half of the book.

Gave it three stars. I liked it fine, didn't love it.

"Pursuit" is yet another one of Karen Robards' 'Heroine in distress' suspense novels. While I've found some of her past work to be cringingly bad, this time at least, she managed to cobble together a halfway-decent plot, with fewer instances of stupid dialogue or idiotic, yet plot-convenient, behavior. The conspiracy-theory angle is nothing new, however, and neither is the seemingly-obligatory scene where the heroine loses her shoes, and Robards goes into an unusual amount detail about her bare feet.
Despite these cliched elements, the relationship between the two characters is more believable than those in Robards' last few books. The chaarcters' dialogue and motivations are both much improved.
A good place to start for someone who's never read a Robards novel; unlike her previous books, this one may encourage you to read another!