CHEVALIER PUBLISHING
CHAMPIONING PRAISEWORTHY WRITING FROM SELECT INDEPENDENT AUTHORS
CHEVALIER PUBLISHING
CHAMPIONING PRAISEWORTHY WRITING FROM SELECT INDEPENDENT AUTHORS
GRAMMAR DOWAGER - Amazon Review
Five-Star Review for IF THE DEVIL HAD A DOG
“Friday’s as good a day as any to run for your life," Sidney McQueen said aloud to herself for perhaps the hundredth time since fleeing Fort Worth. And so the book begins. Thus we immediately want to know, who is Sidney? What and whom is she running from? Why the heck is she fleeing with a horse in tow? Does she even know where she’s running to? This Romantic Suspense and Thriller genre strings one along at a perfect pace – not so fast as to require flipping back to re-read events that lead into the current event, or so slowly that you keep muttering to yourself, “Get ON with it!” I learned in good time who the villains are, and even who the hero might be. It is a “cook the fastest supper you can for your family,” “leave the dishes in the sink,” kind of read. You have to get back to it. Somehow Lukas manages to maintain the pace and at the same time create characters so real you almost feel as if you are a voyeur. Even the bad guys and secondary characters have true-to-life idiosyncrasies. The plot is riveting and the locales, chiefly Ft. Worth and Alpine, Texas, lovingly and truly described. Being contemporary, the book is nothing like her first book, “Orphan Moon,” but it shares the same good writing and clear love of her craft. If you are in the mood for a soft, sweet romance, this is not the book for you as it features a bad-ass Marine, strong female, sex, and violence. As a stand-alone novel, it could be a movie. If we can beg her for sequels, it could be a thrilling TV series."
On her third failed marriage, thirty-four-year-old Sidney McQueen regrets her PhD in Psychology wasn’t useful in choosing husbands. She feels better suited choosing horses. When her divorce attorney advises her to disappear for a while, she heeds the warning. But can she disappear without a trace when her soon-to-be ex-husband, a powerful attorney with ties to Mexican drug cartels, is hell-bent to find her? He wants back what belongs to him—and it’s not just Sidney he’s after.
Forty-five-year-old Markus Yeager, former Marine turned CIA operative, has a top-secret past. Physical and emotional scars cause him to retreat to the small, west Texas town of Alpine to be near an old friend, the one person he trusts. Flashbacks haunt him. His purposefully crafted quiet life is up-ended when Sidney pulls into town, horse trailer in tow.
People from Sidney’s past start turning up dead. Terrified, she questions whether the refuge she sought at Yeager’s remote ranch is enough to protect her from the man she refers to as “The Devil.” Her life-or-death situation draws Markus back into the violent world he thought he’d left behind, a world of weapons, drugs, money, and dangerous traffickers who’d put a bullet in your head while they mouthed their Hail Marys. Markus pursues and confronts the enemy head-on, but first he must confront the demons hounding his mind.
Thrown together in a cauldron boiling over with emotional tension and physical danger, Markus and Sidney allow their tentative bond to feed their individual needs. Once the murderer is apprehended, they breathe a collective sigh of relief, and their relationship, once governed by mutually imposed rules, intensifies. However, when it’s discovered that the one in custody may not be the killer, chasing the truth becomes a frantic race against a deadly predator.