Kindergarten teacher Neve Botticelli leads a quiet life out in Turners Gully. She is settled there, living with her father, a vietnam veteran with post traumatic issues, that has trained her for battle, may it never come! She loves the kindy and all those little children in there, especially one little buddy, called Rowan. He reminds her of her late brother Carlos.

Self made multi billionair Micah Kincaid though is another story. He turns up in Turners Gully looking for his son. The boy has been dragged out of his life by Micah’s wife, the boy’s mother Chelsea. Micah does not hate her. On the contrary, he does everything he can so both of them live a comfortable life.

Things get complicated when Micah finds himself in the kindy and demands to see his son. Neve refuses to align with his demands as she is trying to protect Rowan. When a biker gang gets involved in the whole situation, it all turns uglier than either of them could think. Neve and Micah have to cooperate if they want to have the boy and his mother safe and back to them.

The story is a romantic suspense one, keeping the reader interested in the whole process. The author has done a wonderful job describing the feelings of the father and the child as such. The pictures we get from the little boy are almost visible! There is nothing ugly with this book. No bad language, hot erotic scenes or anything like that, which is actually good, because a romantic story does not need sex scenes to be appealing. That is if the writer has this kind of talent, and Vaile does!

The suspense part of the story is really good as well! The way it develops is very promising and it does not disappoint the reader up until the end of it. The two old blokes come to add to the spice mix of the equation and it really makes sense to have them there. The characters are thoughtfully chosen and built in a way to serve the story on all levels.

Will surely keep an eye on Vaile in the future. That is one great australian writer!

an ok read

I obtained this book through NetGalley.

I really wanted to like this Combatting Fear by Sandy Vaile. The description pulled me in and I thought it was going to be a fun romantic suspense. Plus it's set in Australia, which was a big attraction to me (though there were no spiders in this book, which I found surprising. Or venomous snakes.) Let's start with the back cover copy:

How far would you go to save a child that wasn’t yours?

Mild-mannered kindergarten teacher Neve Botticelli leads a double life. Thanks to a childhood tragedy and her paranoid father, she’s a trained warrior with extreme survival skills who lives off the grid.

When self-made billionaire Micah Kincaid storms into town in search of his son, Rowan, he’s pushy, entitled, and stands for everything she despises. Micah can’t believe a kindergarten teacher is barring the way to him getting crucial information or even just a glimpse of the boy his cheating ex kidnapped. They share only one thing in common: either will do anything to protect the four-year-old, who they soon discover is being held for ransom by an outlaw motorcycle gang.

But as they work together to get Rowan back, they start to see beyond each other’s masks. Could falling in love be even more dangerous than hunting down deadly criminals?

The writing of the book is really good, and the end relationship stuff was well done. Plus there were a lot of elements in the book that worked well. The moments between Tony and Neve especially. The descriptions were evocative and made me feel like I was there. Where I ran into difficulties was with 1) the relationship development, and 2) uneven/contradictory character development.

I'm going to start with the second issue first. Both Neve and Micah were engaging and likeable. But they were also inconsistent and constantly waffled on issues for no good reason. There were no real triggers for much of their--but what if? thought. I got annoyed with both of them. Vaile justified their qualms and fears with a solid foundation. I got why Neve was suspicious of Micah and why he'd doubt her--at least at first. But then it kept feeling artificial as they got to know each other and still had the very same doubts without any real trigger for them.

Then Neve is billed as leading a double life. Not really. I was disappointed in that. And that she's a trained warrior. It didn't really come across. She's weepy and nervous and generally sort of passive. And then she'll have these sudden moments of warrior action and thinking, and then go back to the other. It's aggravating. The warrior stuff comes out somewhat in the end, but still wasn't all that warrior-like. I felt a little bit like there'd been a bait and switch.

The relationship development was also odd. Their attraction came at odd times and sort of out of the blue. The final development was really well done, but the development just didn't feel organic or natural.

In the end, I felt the book was okay, but I didn't come away feeling satisfied.

2 out of 5 stars.

The minute I read the blurb I knew I had to read this book
'.....she’s a trained warrior with extreme survival skills who lives off the grid.'
I don't know about you but I'm getting sick to death of this epidemic of TSTL females that are plaguing so many romance books these days so this sounded like a refreshing change.
The story centres around self-made billionaire Micah Kincaid who's wife Chelsea left a year ago taking their son Rowan with her and Micah is desperate to see and hold his son, how long does it take before a four year old boy forgets the father he hasn't seen in a year?
Micah has taken so much time off during the past year to track his wife, Chelsea, across Australia. To the extent where it's affecting his business as well as losing him time he should be spending in his son.

A lead takes him to Turners Gully and the kindergarten there where he crosses paths with Neve Botticelli.

My problem, and it bothered me from the beginning is that surely a man as rich as Micah would have trained people searching for his son and at the first hint of finding him they'd be all over it, official paperwork, private security, police you name it.
While I understand it's his son I can't for the life of me understand why Micah would just turn up almost guaranteeing that Chelsea would run as she has before.
This may be a small point but it just didn't make sense, he's gone a year without seeing his son yet he has the money to pay for the very best, it's crazy, it's like amateur hour.

It may seem picky but this spoilt the whole book for me and I struggled to keep reading and ended up skimming huge chunks just to get through it.
To make it worse I didn't connect or particularly like either of the main characters.
I found Micah pretentious, he's desperate for clothes and goes to the mall with Neve who automatically starts picking up normal clothes when Micah asks if there's somewhere that isn’t a chain store like maybe Armani, Ralph Lauren, Thomas Pink.

There's a moment when a man grabs Neve and I'm waiting for her to kick his a** after all shes a trained warrior.

So he grabs her and throws her against the car and slaps her hard across the face. She falls on the gravel and shrieks. Once he's satisfied she's cowed he disappears.
She scrambles for her handbag with shaking hands and finds her baton, and shakes it at the shadows then jumps to her feet and trips on a bush.

Okay so she's not the kind of trained warrior I was expecting.
Maybe that's being unfair she was taken by surprise and frightened but by this point this book was turning into one disappointment after another.

I struggled and skimmed my way along hoping it would be a book of two halves and the second would make up for the first. It didn't.
When they find Rowan and Chelsea surrounded by evil bikers surely this is the time to pay and bring in some experts some highly trained help?
No, no it's not it's back to amateur hour.

This book obviously wasn't for me.

I voluntarily read a review copy kindly provided by NetGalley