Lights Out by Natalie Walters follows CIA analyst Brynn Taylor as she joins forces with the SNAP agency, lead by handsome former flame Jack Hudson and a crew of likeable characters, to identify and stop a terrorist attack threatening the United States… and also, they might fall back in love along the way.
I gave Lights Out four stars, but I really oscillated between three and four. I liked the overall plot and the team dynamic (I’m a sucker for a well-written team), but I felt like her writing wasn’t the greatest in terms of quality, though the plot itself was decent. I’m still kind of conflicted, can you tell?
Overall, it’s a good read. I felt like the action was a little slow to get going, but it was interesting enough to keep me turning pages. The two main characters – Brynn and Jack – were likable, but pretty standard for their stereotypes. Brynn was a tough woman who didn’t need no man (but was secretly really lonely) and Jack was your handsome hero. I like these stereotypes, I choose books with them, but readers can be aware they’re pretty typical protagonists. I feel like Walters’ real character charm was found in the SNAP team – Kekoa, Lyla, and Garcia. Their banter and dynamic was my favorite part of the people portion of this novel.
As for the plot portion, I found it becoming more of a page turner as we built up to the end, but I ultimately thought the ending was less exciting than I hoped it would be. Maybe I’m just too picky. I felt like she set things up for a longer haul than we got. It was still enjoyable and believable, and maybe that’s how terrorist threats resolve in the real world (where we definitely would want that to be as anticlimatic as possible), but I felt a little deflated by the resolution. Walters’ bio states her familiarity with military and defense, and I see that coming through in the story she tells, despite my qualms with it. I think it just felt like more needed to happen based on the set up or less needed to be set up to bring us to the end.
I liked this book. I didn’t love it, but I did enjoy it enough to pick up book two (featuring Kekoa, yay) and will probably read book three when it is published later this year. If a clean, relatively quick-to-read military “thriller” is your thing, give this one a try!
Meredith
Copyright Natalie Walters and Revell. Image from Amazon.
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