Shadow Woman

by Linda Howard

[Rowena]

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book by Linda Howard. I don’t even remember the last book that I read by Howard but whatever it was, I read it a while ago. I was kind of wary going into this read because I read online that a chunk of readers were disappointed in this book and I also read that the hero and heroine don’t even come together (like talk to each other) until more than halfway through the book. So yeah, I was scared to start this one.

Having read it from cover to cover now, I can say that the readers were right that the hero and heroine talk to each other (as love interests) for the first time at about the 70% mark on my Kindle copy. But I wasn’t too mad about that, I was actually very interested in what was going on in the story that I didn’t mind too much.

This story takes place in DC and follows Lizette Henry as she tries to remember the life that brought her to where she is today. She wakes up one morning and doesn’t recognize the face that is looking back at her in the mirror. Things aren’t adding up to what she knows and she starts to remember how to do things that she can’t remember learning so a huge chunk of this book is trying to find out what happened to Lizette that brought her here and so on and so forth.

Lizette is known as Subject C to the people that are monitoring her. Her entire life is bugged. There isn’t a part of her life that isn’t carefully monitored and Lizette doesn’t have any idea why. When flashbacks start coming in, Lizette starts relying on old habits that she doesn’t remember but knows how to do anyway. When the bullets start flying, Liz is on her own until the guy that she’s been dreaming about, X shows up and at first she doesn’t trust him because he shows up with guns and he’s chasing her and blah blah blah but that changes after they finally talk.

I enjoyed this story but I will admit that it was really slow in the beginning. It took me a while to really get into the story but by about the fifth or sixth chapter, things picked up and things got interesting. I enjoyed the characters and I enjoyed the putting the puzzle pieces together. This book was kind of like The Hangover, the Secret Service edition. Lots of action, not a lot of romance but still an enjoyable read. I would have liked to get to know Xavier a bit more but aside from that, this was a good read.