Well. This one was quite different than expected. The cop and the burglar. SO cute and so gritty. I enjoyed both guys here - Nate the cop in blue and Caesar the poor thief. The interracial elements are well done - nothing seemed off. Since I spent 24 years in SoCal I met plenty of couples that were part hispanic and part white and this rang pretty true. I think more family interaction would have made it maybe clearer but there wasn't much to be gained. As for the police part I thought that was great - it felt authentic (due to author's creds I guess) and I enjoyed reading that as much as the sex and romance'y parts. Very well put together with enough bite and edge to keep you going. Good romance, but the action plotline suffersWarning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS. Rating: 6/10PROS: - The story seems to be pretty well-researched. There’s a fair amount of detail, and not just in one area. There are police details pertaining to Nate, burglary/home alarm details pertaining to Caesar, and details about the town of Hollywood that make the setting come to life, at least for me since I’ve never been there in person.- The relationship develops at a pace that I found believable. There’s no love at first sight here, and not even “love after a couple of rolls in the hay.” There’s lust, then begrudging association, then tentative trust, then like, and then love.- I appreciated that Buchanan didn’t let Caesar off scot-free. Although he’s a morally good person, he’s also a criminal, and I like that the story resolves in such a way that his crimes are not entirely ignored.CONS:- I wish I’d seen more along lines of the action/mystery plotline and a bit less sex. Don’t get me wrong; I thought the romance angle of the story was pretty good. But the guys are running away or hiding for much of the book, and the investigation plot felt very secondary to me.- I’ve read several stories in this genre along the same lines as this one (that is, stories with assassins or criminals as main characters). For some reason I found it more difficult than usual to sympathize with the anti-hero here. I was a good sixty pages into the story before I began to care whether things turned out well for Caesar.- Poor copy editing is common in this genre, but it hits me harder in print stories than it does in electronic books. Errors like these--“do you really want your neighbors knowing your working with the cops?”; “Caesar had no intention of moving any more then he absolutely had to”; etc.--drive me batty.Overall comments: It took me a bit to get into the story, because at first I found myself feeling vaguely uneasy while I read, both because I didn’t *like* what Caesar was doing and because I was worried he would get caught. I did end up liking the story pretty well, but I think it would have been much stronger overall if it had about 30 more pages scattered throughout that beefed up the action storyline and brought that part of the story to a more satisfying conclusion.
