Author: Traci Hunter Abrahamson
I know I'm only on my eighth book of the thirty Whitney nominees, but I'm beginning to notice some trends: this is the second book that explicitly relates to the massacre at Virginia Tech (also Altered State), the second book with a female protagonist who dealt with a major life tragedy approximately two years earlier (also Methods of Madness), and the second book with a major male lead named Tristan (also Illuminations of the Heart). It's at least the seventh book with unfathomably gorgeous main characters too. I don't think I'll be escaping that one anytime soon. I need to read some books about ugly people after I finish these, just so I don't have to read about handsome faces and gorgeous physiques anymore. Gag.
Lockdown is the story of Riley Palmetta, a woman finishing up a master's degree in criminal psych at the school where she was one of three people in her classroom to survive a massacre while she was an undergrad. She's assigned to work with a group of LDS Navy Seals (aka "the Saint Squad") in training groups of law enforcement officials in how to minimize tragedies in future school massacres. However, a school massacre is brewing at the high school just down the street.
I'll admit that this story kept me reading. I never felt like I wanted to throw the book across the room, and while I've felt compelled to push myself through several of the books I've read so far, I actually looked forward to getting back to this one. I'm not exactly sure why. Riley and Tristan in Lockdown could be fairly easily interchanged with Emily and Zach in Methods of Madness or Natalie and Hans in Tribunal or even Alma and Maia in Alma, so I don't know if it was the characters. And it certainly wasn't the originality of the love story, or even, for that matter, the originality of the main story. But for some reason I still liked it.
But I also felt like Lockdown couldn't decide what kind of book it wanted to be. In many thriller-type books (think Grisham or Baldacci), I'd say that the book is about 80% thriller and 20% personal interest/romance. In Lockdown, it's the opposite: it's really the story of Riley and Tristan falling in love, with their work providing a backdrop. And even though that was interesting to me, I'm not sure it would work for a larger audience, especially a male audience who might be prepared for more action and less, well, action of another sort. And the ending is impossibly cheesy. Gag. But what can I say, I'm a sucker for two people falling in love, so it was fun for me to read, although I'd be hard pressed to say it's a good book.
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