Going Dark by Monica McCarty Series: The Lost Platoon #1
Published by Berkley Books on September 5, 2017
Genres: Contemporary Romance, Military Romance, Romantic Suspense
Pages: 326
Format: Paperback
Source: Self Purchased
ISBN: 0399587705
The members of a top secret SEAL Team can't keep their passion under wraps in this thrilling contemporary romantic suspense series from New York Times bestselling author Monica McCarty.
Like Rome's Lost Legion, a SEAL platoon goes on a mission and vanishes without a trace.
After walking into a trap on a covert op in Russia, the men from top secret SEAL Team Nine are presumed dead. Not knowing whom they can trust, and with war hanging in the balance, the survivors must go dark and scatter around the globe.
Marine ecologist Annie Henderson joins her new boyfriend on a trip to the Western Isles of Scotland to protest a hazardous offshore drilling venture. When she realizes that she may be swept up in something far more dangerous than she'd intended, there is only one man she can turn to. . . .
She and the mysterious but sexy dive boat captain haven't exactly gotten off to the best start, but something about his quiet confidence makes her think that he's the kind of man she can depend on. Because he's gruff and guarded, she can tell Dan Warren has secrets. But she could never imagine how high the stakes are for him to keep his cover, even as he risks everything to protect her. . . .
I will admit that I was a bit nervous to pick this book up, I have only read her historical’s so I wasn’t sure how she would do with a romantic suspense although both require some well planned research for the world building. After seeing book three being released and seeing how many have loved these books so far, I just knew it was time to read them. So I grabbed this one up and I am so happy that Ihave done so….this author will always work for me and she has become an auto buy author for me. From the get go, I couldn’t put this book down and I had a feeling this book would be such a keeper and it definitely turned out that way.
Our story begins with SEAL Team Nine on a submarine, traveling to the Baltic Sea towards Russia and going on a dangerous mission, one that if they are discovered by the Russians, it could cause a war. The LT, has a very bad feeling about this mission, too many risks and not enough facts given to them. But their mission is compromised when the LT receives a message about it being a trap and with half of his team killed, he gathers the survivors and scatters them all over the world until they figure out who betrayed them and who was behind their team being attacked when no one should have known they were there.
Our heroine, has come to Scotland, in protest against oil spills against marine wild life. After she witnessed a horrible spil of oil and seeing the devastation to the marine life she knew she had found her purpose. She and her boyfriend want to make a stand although she isn’t sure what the plan really is. She feels the situation is a bit iffy, but she trusts her boyfriend. But then while on a boat to the oil rigging for a protest, she finds explosives in one of their friends bags and she knows that she is in way over her head. The captain of the boat, is someone she feels that she can trust and is capable. And they manage to escape but now they are on the run from the authorities who think they are the criminals. Dean and Annie have to work together to survive and stay one step ahead of the eco terrorists. But Dean also knows he is putting his team at risk by staying with Annie.
Dean and Annie know that there is no way to be together because of their circumstances, especially when Annie learns who Dean really is and that its just not him that he is protecting, but what is left of his team. But there is a connection between Dean and Annie, and they draw closer as the danger to them gets nearer to them and Dean realizes some important facets about himself and if he is willing to fight for what they have or let it go because of the danger surrounding them.
I really had SO much of a good time reading this book and it really speaks to your emotions and I truly admire this talent that Monica McCarty has with aspect in her stories. I fell in love with this story for the most part, I will admit that the heroine drove me a bit nuts with her anti military ways and her misconceptions about many things made it appear how naive she could be. But I did enjoy seeing her change and see how wrong she is about certain things. The chemistry between Dean and Annie is very obvious and it was interesting seeing them explore this aspect of their relationship and I do love the way McCarty writes her sex scenes. But we also get the details to the overall plot of the series and enjoyed seeing where McCarty takes this and I am curious to find out what we will see in future books and see how this team will find out the truth.
Overall I found Going Dark to be a stunning story that gave me all the edgy thrills that you expect from romantic suspense and McCarty delivers on ALL fronts and I found this book to be a SPECTACULAR addition to her work!! FANTASTICALLY WELL WRITTEN!!
About Monica McCarty
What do you get when you mix a legal career, a baseball career, motherhood, and a love of history with a voracious reader? In my case, a Historical Romance Author.
Like most writers, I’ve always loved to read. Growing up in California there was always plenty to do outside, but all too often I could be found inside curled up with a book (or two or three). I started with the usual fare: The Little House on the Prairie series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Watership Down, Nancy Drew, and everything by Judy Blume. Once I cleared off my bookshelf, I started swiping books from my mom. Some, like Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight, probably weren’t the most appropriate choice for a pre-adolescent—although they were definitely illuminating. I can still remember the look of abject horror on my mom’s Catholic-girl-face when I asked her what a virgin was. After that rather brief conversation, she paid a little closer attention to what had disappeared off her book shelf, and steered me in the direction of Harlequin and Barbara Cartland romances. I was hooked. I quickly read through the inventory of the local library and was soon buying bags of romances at garage sales.
In high school, with the encouragement of my father (who I think was a little concerned about the steady diet of romances), I read over eighty of the Franklin Library’s One Hundred Greatest Books ever written—including Tolstoy, Confucius, Plato, and the entire works of Shakespeare. Some of them were tough going for a teenager, but the experience would prove an invaluable foundation for college. After reading War and Peace, I wasn’t easily intimidated.
For some reason Monica decided to go into writing and not fashion.
After graduation, I loaded up the VW (Jetta not Bus) and trekked down I-5 to attend the University of Southern California, majoring in Political Science and minoring in English (see why all that reading helped!). I joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, and when I wasn’t studying or at football games, did my best to support the local bartending industry. Ah, the good old days.
With that kind of fun, four years of college wasn’t quite enough. So leaving Tommy Trojan behind, I traveled back up north to Palo Alto for three more years of study at Stanford Law School. Once I survived the stress of the first semester, law school proved to be one of the best times of my life—garnering me a JD, life-long friends, a husband, and an unexpectedly intimate knowledge of baseball. (See “The Baseball Odyssey” below).
Law School was also where I fell in love with Scotland. In my third year, I took a Comparative Legal History class, and wrote a paper on the Scottish Clan System and Feudalism. So I immediately dropped out of law school and went on to write Scottish Historical Romances…well no, not quite. You see, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer, I was a “poet” (i.e., not into math), and I love to argue. It seemed natural.
So I finished law school, got married, passed the CA bar, moved to Minnesota (with a few stops along the way), waived into the MN bar, worked as a litigator for a few satisfying years, moved back to CA, had a couple of kids, realized that a legal career and being a single parent for most of the year (due to husband's career) would be extremely difficult, and THEN decided to sit down and write.
And how did I end up writing romance? It’s not as divergent as it seems. What I loved about being a lawyer are the same things I love about being a writer—research and writing. The only thing missing is the arguing, but that’s what a husband and kids are for, right?
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