Review: Red Nights by Shari J. Ryan


Note: This ARC was provided by Booktrope via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When Felicity Stone wakes up to smoke infiltrating her bedroom, she fights desperately to get out but it isn’t easy. With her twin brother Blake away for the night, she’s alone and suffocating. Soon she’s rescued but then belatedly realizes that Blake was home the whole time and has suffered injuries that are impossible for him to recover from. Feeling guilty for not having done more to save Blake, Felicity wallows in her grief, only finding respite when she comes across a stranger walking his dog on dark night at a nearby park.

After an important case goes unsolved and leaves him broken, Hayes Peyton decides to take a step back from his job with the police force. The sense of loss and failure haunts him until he meets Felicity Stone. He finds himself wanting to spend more time with her, but when she’s considered a suspect in the blaze that’s turned into a case of arson, Hayes offers his expertise in order to prove Felicity’s innocence. But how can he help her if she begins to doubt his very presence in her life, leaving her unsure of Hayes’s own motives.

Red Nights is a standalone romantic suspense novel from author Shari J. Ryan and is about a woman who loses not just her home to a devastating fire but her twin brother. Weighed down by guilt and grief, chef Felicity Stone is further devastated by news that the fire was intentionally set and that evidence appears to be pointing her way. The stranger she meets at the park turns out to be a former member of the police department, Hayes Peyton, a man battling his own set of demons but appears to be exactly what Felicity needs. Theirs isn’t a simple attraction, what with them becoming heavily invested in each other quickly. While the intensity of their feelings may seem like a case of insta-love, I do like the dynamic that they both have together, though the one-liners and punchlines tend to get tiresome at times.

I suspected there was something more than a simple house fire going on and I had the guilty party firmly in my head early on. I changed my mind once and then stuck to it, which was a good thing because it turned out that my second choice was the perpetrator. I love books like this—ones that are able to make me question my original suspicions, leading to second-guessing—because they can keep readers on their toes. There were moments that the story-telling felt choppy, almost as if we were jumping from one thing to another with suddenly new information that seemed out of left field. Still, I enjoyed the story and the characters and was able to finish reading in one sitting. Red Nights is a good romantic suspense book and I’m giving it four out of five stars. ♥

Release Date: 18 June 2015

Date Read: 13 June 2015

Learn more about Shari J. Ryan here.

Purchase Red Nights on Amazon | B&N.

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