Review: In the Arms of Danger by Jaydyn Chelcee

Danger Blackstone--that is, Sheriff Danger Blackstone was the law in this town, a compact little community in Montana, a town that had seen vandalism and the disappearance of women over the past months. Now, in the middle of the night, Ms Lacey Weston had been caught sneaking amid the shadows, and she is now under arrest. The sheriff is taking no chances.v>

Lacey Weston is a photo journalist who has come to Montana to do a series on the Western United States. But she has seen far more than she planned--namely, the murder of a young woman, a person who she watched being tortured and finally whose life was snuffed out before her eyes. She managed to run, and run she did, for miles and miles it seemed, until she landed in Sheriff Blackstone's jail. She didn't stay there long, however. Through a series of somewhat comical events, Ms Weston found herself free and in possession of the sheriff's SUV keys, and the sheriff was sitting in her cell in his undies. Little did she know that the gas tank was almost empty with a major storm on the horizon, a storm that ultimately put her life in real danger.

This is a complicated novel that involves the hang-ups of two people: 1) a sheriff that is competent and effective as a lawman, but who has hang-ups about his mixed racial heritage. You can easily make out the shape of the chip on his shoulder. Yet he has a heart that is as big as the state of Montana, and even though Lacey Weston has humiliated him and is on the run, he knows her life is in jeopardy and he is obligated to find her before she dies. 2) A photo-journalist who is still trying to break through the professional "glass ceiling," who is tired of being put down because of her gender, who bristles at the dismissive way the sheriff has handled her report of the "supposed" murder, and who believes that her life is in danger, more from the murderer than from the coming storm.

The early encounter between these two is protracted to the point that it was a bit wearisome for me--I just felt it could have been shorter and just as effective. Yet it was humorous and I had to chuckle a number of times. There was no getting around their attraction to one another, but the sexual tension between them was frequently neutralized by Lacey's arrogance and Danger's penchant for treating her like an empty-headed female. Their adventure gets even more involved as Danger must rescue her from roaring flood waters, must find a way to get them both out of the Montana wilderness safely, while knowing they were being tracked by the murderer.

There's lots to like in this novel although I think the action is spotty sometimes. That is not to say that it isn't interesting. Both main characters are strong and vibrant, their feelings about themselves sometimes getting in the way more than they should, but they come to some kind of alliance necessary to combat their dangerous situation. Both Lacey and Danger have to move out of their emotional comfort zones to begin understanding one another, especially Danger who has a very skewed opinion of women and whose not-very-well-hidden complex about his mixed heritage keeps surfacing. Behind the scenes is the rather endearing context of Danger's ancient grandparents, both of whom are probably on the edge mentally, and yet the reader is not really able to discern if this is approaching dementia or really two very wise and savvy Native American shamans who know far more about life and the future than most people are comfortable with.

This is the first of Ms Chelcee's novels I have read, but I am looking forward to reading the next in this series. I give the novel a 3.75 out of 5 rating.