Poison Evidence by Rachel Grant - Book review

Published: 25 October 2016
Series: Evidence #7
Pages: 374
Warnings: Language
Source: Amazon kindle purchase

It was supposed to be paradise….
Ivy MacLeod has the perfect opportunity to test her advanced remote sensing technology: mapping a World War II battle site in the islands of Palau. The project is more than an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise. It’s also an opportunity to distance her reputation from her traitorous ex-husband.

But foreign intelligence agencies will kill to possess her invention, and paradise turns deadly when her ex-husband’s vicious allies attack. In desperation, she turns to Air Force pilot Jack Keaton. But is he the bigger threat? Jack might be protecting her as he claims…or he could be a foreign agent. Her compass is skewed by his magnetic pull and further thrown off when she learns her own government has betrayed her.

Stranded on a tropical island with a man whose motives remain a mystery, Ivy must decide who is the spy, who is the protector, and who is the ultimate villain. She longs to trust the man who rescued her, but she’s risking more than her heart. Choose right, and she saves her country’s secrets—and her life. Choose wrong—and she risks nothing short of all-out war.

Book cover - Poison Evidence by Rachel Grant

Book links: Amazon | Goodreads

Banner on green background with decorative stars, saying My Review

Poison Evidence is a romantic thriller that will appeal to those of you who are a fan of a mixture of espionage, politics, a spunky spy as the lead man and a seriously smart leading lady. I purchased this book as part of the Dangerous as Sin anthology of 10 novels of romantic suspense, but it is also available for individual purchase.

Ivy has a genius level IQ and she’s not scared to use it. I love reading a story that actually requires a bit of brain power from the reader, and this book meets that criteria. Ivy is in the process of testing her invention, which is able to map items on the sea floor using drone technology. I found it all really interesting that she sometimes went into detail, describing the technology involved. But I loved that the way Rachel Grant wrote about it allowed me to easily keep up without having to worry about stopping to work out what she was actually talking about.

Jack isn’t all that he initially seems. He has had a hard life and is stuck in a very tough spot, but he is working hard at doing his very best to protect Ivy from those who want to steal her invention. I really like his character. He’s tough but still sensitive, he has a very strong moral compass, and he provides quite a good mental view of his muscles, too.

While Ivy and Jack have some difficulties in the area of trust, there is no difficulty in the area of chemistry. But this isn’t necessarily helping them – instead, at times it gets in the way and confuses the issue.

Going on all around these two is a web of lies and deceit that I really enjoyed. There are quite a lot of characters involved in this story, but it is all so well laid out that there was never an issue keeping up with who is who, or what is going on. There is always plenty of information to keep the reader easily following along .

I also really enjoy the spy side of this book. The descriptions of how the people and stories are all interwoven is really well done. I never saw the twist coming at all and it caught me so much by surprise that I doubted it at first and had to read on to make sure I was right!

I would have given Poison Evidence 5 stars, but in a few spots I thought it hovered a little too long and I found it dragging just a touch. This one to me is more like a 4.5. And I’ve only given this book 3 hatchets for violence. While there are plenty of waving guns and punches being thrown, it isn’t described with any detail and it never approaches the point of gruesome.

Poison Evidence is #7 in the Evidence series and there are 12 books in total so far in the series. While there is some cross over characters from previous books, I haven’t read any of the previous titles and I had no trouble understanding any part of the story at all.

Ratings of 4 flames for romance, 4 chilis for spice, 3 hatchets for violence and 4 thumbs up overall

Banner on green background with stars to highlight, saying 'about the author'

USA Today bestselling author Rachel Grant worked for over a decade as a professional archaeologist and mines her experiences for story lines and settings, which are as diverse as excavating a cemetery underneath an historic art museum in San Francisco; surveying an economically depressed coal mining town in Kentucky; and mapping a seventeenth century Spanish and Dutch fort on the island of Sint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles.

In all her travels and adventures as an archaeologist, Rachel has found many sites and artifacts, but she’s only found one true treasure, her husband, David. They met while working together excavating a four thousand year old site about to be destroyed by the expansion of a sewage treatment plant in Seattle. Despite their romantic first meeting, she has no intention of ever setting a story at a sewage treatment plant.

Rachel Grant lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children.