Review: Overkill by Sandra Brown

My brain was furiously working on my blog post in my dreams a few nights ago. 

I flew through 150 pages without blinking. I could see everything. Brown's writing has always drawn me in and captured my mind. Not only in its movie-quality explanations but in how it lets my mind run wild by drawing images with the descriptions.
It took me 24 hours to read and then a few more to process because this was, somehow, a different kind of book for me than her others.

I spend Christmas/Thanksgiving in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so the cabin in North Carolina made me long for that peace. Zack's character reminded me of my culinary friend Kevin, who also lived on the side of a mountain, and I loved how at ease he looked. How he explained his small town intricacies, the winter months when people bid on the last snow shovel or what time was best for the all-you-could-eat pizza place. I remember those times, and reading about this character who 'ran away' into the peacefulness of the mountains made me long to be there myself.
You kind of forgive and forget when you're encompassed in such a serene place. Brown captured that for me.
That's what Zack wanted. Even though he was the opposite, he would protect that by putting on an asshole vibe.
 

It was an astounding story, and following several characters through the pages gave a nice 360 view of the story as a whole.

At the start, you see Eban, the sociopathic villain, and his two henchmen, Theo and Cal, making pretty big mistakes. One mistake is the worst of them all, and throughout the story, you get to see the impact on each person.
Every one of them.

Then you see the match between Zack and Kate based on this twist of fate, the differences, the commonplaces. What each has to offer the other in defiance of social norms.

 

I had read a few reviews for the book after I had read it because I was stuck overthinking a few things, but I have to say: Where did all the good reviewers go? The one I read that made me cringe used a lot of LOLs and complained about how spicy the book was. A true fan knows there's a high spice level in all the books she wrote that preceded Overkill. This one was surprisingly mild in comparison.
Yeesh, first-timers.

I learned the art of spice from Sandra Brown! She writes the romance scenes tastefully, so I more or less threw out that particular GoodReads review and decided to write my own.

I realized that this book took a little time to settle with me after I read it. I had a few moments of introspection about how I felt this book was so much different from Brown's last few, like Thick As Thieves or Outfox.

I think that was the point of this book.

Then as it settled in, I dreamt about it and realized that during 2020, we all kind of went into a weird survival mode. We soul searched. That's what she was doing with this book, I feel.
I saw that in this book because Zack was introspective, too; he was a different kind of male lead that she had crafted before; this one, to me, felt like he was an adult. The other male leads were always very secretive about feelings, showing weakness, etc. The bad boys were secret soft boys with a stern but candy coating.

Then there was Zack. At first, he was kind of an asshole regarding things that mattered: his privacy, his property, and his livelihood. He was protective of his ex-wife and even her parents. Then later protective over Kate.
There was an air of the older books in there, but it was completely new to me. Having a character who acted mature, a little sarcastic of course, and definitely a little frisky, but he was a new and I loved it. But he was adult protective, versus throwing everything to the wild and hoping for the best; protective.

I started reading Sandra Brown's books my last year of middle school; I was 14, while everyone else was reading Harry Potter and Holes. I was never one to jump on the bandwagon, so I picked out three books from the thrift store and wound up with my first Sandra Brown, Envy.
Homegirl from GoodReads has no idea what spicy is if Overkill was her first.

My old ass soul has brought me here, being an avid Sandra Brown reader and fan at the ripe age of 33.

So, with every fiber of my being, I have to say I LOVED every bit of this new book.
I can't wait for the next one to come out!

Until then, I'm painstakingly editing my novels, waiting for my preordered books to roll in since I've read almost everything in my to-be-read pile.