Solitary Man
National Readers’ Choice Award Winner & USA Today bestseller, Solitary Man is a riveting romantic suspense about loyalty, loss, and the power of love.
On a desert battlefield, Sgt. Ryder Bronson makes an oath to protect his dying friend’s wife from a vicious enemy and from a passion that could overwhelm them both.
After surviving a deadly attack, Ryder Bronson returns home to fulfill a promise—to keep his dead friend’s wife safe from a scandal so dark it threatens her life.
But protecting her from a distance is essential. Close contact with Brenna McMurtrey means fighting the guilt and desire waiting to destroy him.
Over a year after her husband’s death, Brenna is finally ready to move on. But just as she begins to push past the grief and start living again, danger hits at every turn.
Several close calls prove she is the target of a sinister scheme. Nowhere is safe, especially not home.
Her surly neighbor appears to be watching her, a man whose gray eyes hold an ocean of tragedy. He seems to be everywhere at once—always ready to protect her.
Even if he can keep her safe, a part of Brenna will still be in jeopardy.
The part that believes she can never love again.
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Format | 186 pages, Kindle Edition |
| Published | October 1, 2020 by Boroughs Publishing Group |
| ISBN | |
| ASIN | B01M8O0T83 |
Retailers
Praise
Two grieving people slowly glide into love while working together to find out who’s trying to harm the heroine and why
Brennaa McMurtrey is a self-sufficient, capable woman. She’s had to be. As a military wife, she’s had to solve her problems by herself. But when her husband doesn’t come home from deployment to Iraq, she faces a problem she’s not equipped to solve: a lifetime of solitude and loneliness because she believes she can’t ever love again.
Still, she’s practical. After a year and a half of widowhood, she forces herself to resume “normal” life again—an immediately finds herself in abnormal situations. A speeding car swerves toward her in an alley. Luckily, her “Grumpy Neighbor” (the rude, perpetually annoyed guy next door) is there and pulls her out of the way. Then her tire goes flat. Again, Grumpy Neighbor immediately appears to change it. She notices for the first time he’s actually very attractive, and he reluctantly admits his name is “Ry.” Other such accidents happen, with Ry showing up to rescue her.
But they aren’t accidents after all. The repair shop tells her a valve in her tire was tampered with. Someone is try to scare—or even kill—Brenna.
It’s no coincidence either that Ry—in reality, Ryder Bronson, her late husband’s sergeant and best friend in Afghanistan—is always there to save her. He’s fulfilling a deathbed promise to Brenna’s husband, whose death he wrongly blames himself for.
That’s the set up of SOLITARY MAN, and I won’t give away any more of the plot so that you can be surprised by what happens.
Things I liked about SOLITARY MAN
1. Brenna is an admirable character. She’s got inner strength, and she’s smart and brave too. Not “spunky,” but brave. When dangerous things happened, she dealt with them, but she didn’t purposely throw herself in harm’s way.
2. “Grumpy Neighbor” Ryder was too grumpy at first to be likable, but from the start I admired his sense of honor and the lengths he went to to keep his promise.
3. Not only are Brenna and Ryder fully fleshed out people, but the other characters are also. This is not one of those boring two-dimensional romances where every scene is about the couple’s romance. Instead, both have jobs, friends, enemies, and dogs, all of whom feel so real that it’s easy to keep them straight. Their worlds feel full and realistic. Also, I learned a lot about Brenna and Ryder when I saw them interact with others.
4. Their mutual grief over Kenny’s death both brings Brenna and Ryder together and pushes them apart. Both are confused by their mutual growing attraction, which partly seems a betrayal of Kenny. I found this conflict believable and strong, and it was a conflict that forced both people to grow toward happiness.
5. The author was careful to avoid clichés. For example, never did Ry or Brenna suspect the other was an enemy. Nor did they bicker over petty misunderstandings. I wasn’t able to predict the plot but kept guessing what would happen next until the end.
6. I read the Kindle version, which had NO spelling, grammar, and formatting errors.
Things I didn’t like about SOLITARY MAN
If you’ve read other reviews of mine, I always try to be honest about both a book’s good points and its flaws. But I found nothing to criticize in SOLITARY MAN.
I recommend this contemporary romance novel to anyone who likes to read about a heroine and hero with integrity, characters who behave believably, and a rich, developed world that feels real.