REVIEW: STING, BY SANDRA BROWN

 

 

 

When Mickey Bolden and Shaw Kinnard met up in a dive bar in Tobias, Louisiana, they had one purpose. A man named Billy Panella had hired Bolden to kill Jordan (Jordie) Bennett, and Kinnard had come along as a partner in the task. They were planning out the hit.

Seeing Jordie come into the bar was a surprise to both of them, as it is obvious that this is not her kind of place, and their Plan A did not include killing her here and now.

So Plan B takes effect, and when she exits, Bolden and Kinnard follow her…and suddenly there is a shot, and Bolden is dead. Before Jordie can realize what is happening, she has been knocked unconscious, and sometime later, she is aware of being bound in the back seat of a car.

After an intense start, what happens next in Sting will keep you turning pages, but the details are sometimes tedious. Hovering over it all is the question: is Kinnard going to kill Jordie, or is something more happening? Over a two-day period, she is kept bound and then blindfolded, but she is also kept hydrated and fed. She has figured out by now that her fate is tied to the criminal financial schemes that her brother Josh and Panella did together. Panella escaped, and Josh was taken into witness protection, so neither has paid for his crimes.

Intense events kept me hopping as I tried to figure out what Kinnard’s goal might be, as it was obvious there was more going on beneath the surface.

When suddenly and unexpectedly, Jordie turns things around and gets the upper hand, everything changes. Cops and EMTs are on the scene, and within hours, we learn more about Kinnard.

The intense attraction between the two is an undercurrent seething between them, so it won’t be long until they act on their feelings.

Will Panella be captured at some point? Will Josh, who has escaped from protection, turn himself in? What will ultimately happen, if anything, between Shaw Kinnard and Jordie? And what will we learn about the relationship between Jordie and Josh that has kept her tied to him, enabling him for years?

The story takes us from Tobias to the French Quarter of New Orleans…and ends up in Bayou Gauche where all the pieces come together in a stunning reveal. Nothing is as it seems, and I did not see any of these last pieces unfolding. A delightful story that kept me engaged, this one earned 4.5 stars.

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