BLOOD AND FIRE – Shannon McKenna
Kensington Brava
ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-2867-3
October 2011
Romantic Suspense

Portland, Oregon – Present Day

Lily Parr has lived an awful life—her mother died giving birth to her, and by the time she was ten, her father Howard for some reason became an alcoholic and drug abuser, and her life was constantly built around keeping him from overdosing.  The past few years she has spent over eleven thousand dollars a month keeping him in a facility whose main job is preventing Howard from committing suicide.  Just why he has been scared for the past almost twenty years she has no idea, until one day when she visits he opens up to her.  But his nurse comes in and chases Lily away for bothering him.  Hours later, Howard commits suicide by slicing his wrists, and his nurse is gone.  Unknown to Lily, the nurse is an operative programmed by “King”, who has watched Howard for years, just waiting for him to spill his guts to someone.  Now Lily must be eliminated, and she is on the run, her only clue the name “Bruno Ranieri”.  Weeks later she finds Bruno, and their lives go from rotten to desperate quickly.

When he was twelve, Bruno's mother was killed by her boyfriend Rudy, and his nightmares have continued ever since.  When the beautiful woman comes in the diner where he's filling in, he can't believe the connection between them.  Then, when she agrees to leave with him that night, he can't believe his good luck.  On the way to his apartment, three men attack and try to kill them, and they go on the run.  To help them, they end up involving Bruno's friend Kevin McCloud, his whole family of brothers, and Alex Aaro, a mysterious friend who prefers to live with as little human contact as possible.  Now Bruno needs to know why people are trying to kill him, and the answer lies with Lily.

Bruno and Lily's story is long and deadly, and it's impossible to go over everything that happens.  From Lily's father Howard's addictions to Bruno's nightmares and seeing his mother killed in front of him, they have some sort of unknown connection.  The bad guy, King, has so many marvelous contraptions I never knew existed: he has tracking bugs that can't be detected, programs on cell phones that can be quickly installed and let you hear every call, and human beings who take their orders from him and use their programming words to relieve their pain and calm their nerves.  How Lily and Bruno's life is intertwined is complex and not easily discovered and forms the center of their relationship.  Bruno and Kevin McCloud practically grew up together, after Kevin also escaped from a man who tried programming him for evil purposes.  The other McCloud brothers deeply feel the rift between themselves and Kevin, and are jealous of how he treats Bruno as more of a brother than them.

Shannon McKenna burst on the writing scene about ten years ago and became the one writer I couldn't wait to read, the one whose hard cover book I bought.  Who could wait until it came out in paperback?  For the past several years she has continued the stories of the McCloud family, a group of brothers raised by a survivalist father with only themselves to rely on.  In BLOOD AND FIRE, a friend of the McCloud's, Bruno Ranieri, has a history almost as horrific as theirs.  Told from Bruno's and Lily's points of view, we again enter a world of paranoia and violence.  Unfortunately, Ms. McKenna's last book, FADE TO NIGHT, also featured an evil man taking children and doing mental programming of them and making them into virtual robots, answerable only to him.  This book also has a similar evil man, which sort of dulled the interest in BLOOD AND FIRE.  Lily was the strong-willed woman who was living a quiet life, a hand-to-mouth existence, and then becomes someone who thinks she can butt her way into life-and- death activities.  A pet peeve of mine is women who don't trust in men trained in the evil side of life constantly trying to “help”.  And while Bruno and Lily develop a relationship quickly, I really wasn't feeling it.  Ms. McKenna can usually turn up the heat to sweltering, but here there just wasn't the passion I'm used to from her writing.

There are so many secondary characters I can only give you a glance at them.  There are all the McCloud brothers and their various wives.  Zia Rosa is Bruno's great aunt, who knows what happened all those years ago.  Detective Petrie is with the Portland Police Department, and butting his head into McCloud business wasn't the best thing for him.  Alex Aaro is a friend of the McCloud's used to living under the radar and liking it, glad to keep all records of his life as unknown as possible.

BLOOD AND FIRE, another chapter in the McCloud brother's series, is probably better enjoyed if you've read one or two of the other books about them, but not knowing their histories should not stop you for enjoying the story, it will just give you an urge to read the previous ones.  While not her best effort, BLOOD AND FIRE is still an exciting and action-packed read.  Learn why Shannon McKenna is such an exciting author and give BLOOD AND FIRE a try.

Cece Johns