Book Review: Line of Fire by Rachel Ann Nunes (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Line of Fire
Author: Rachel Ann Nunes
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG or PG-13 for violence, drugs, veiled discussion of sexual slavery

Line of Fire is the fourth book in the Autumn Rain series, which means that fans of the series have had three books to appreciate quirky, barefoot hippie Autumn Rain, to understand the complexities of her budding relationship with police detective Shannon, to learn the history of her birth mother and her adoptive parents and the protectiveness she feels for her twin sister, Tawnia, and to process how difficult it is to confront her birth father, Cody Beckett, who is considered the prime suspect in the disappearance of a young girl in Salem, Oregon. Readers of the series have also come to see Autumn's gift as someone who can receive impressions from objects that people have handled in the past as believable and intrinsic to her character.

But I picked up the series in the fourth book, and while Nunes gives us a skeleton outline of all of these relevant facts, it's hardly more than a few paragraphs before she plunges into the story, where Autumn and Shannon travel from Portland to Salem to help find this missing teenager. On the way they interrupt a robbery at a convenience store, then find themselves getting shot at, then they realize that the whole situation is a lot more complicated than it appears, and someone from the police seems to be informing the bad guys about what's going to happen.

And what happens next is a lot of fighting. They shoot at each other in one place, manage to escape, then shoot at each other in another place, then Autumn eats some meat, then it repeats all over again. The whole book takes places in about 24 hours, and I bet that the characters shot most of the bullets in the state of Oregon during that time frame. I am the kind of girl who falls asleep as soon as the opening montage is done in any James Bond movie. I've always said that bullets are like lullabies to me, and apparently bullets in print do the same thing. They lose their ability to scare me when everyone gets shot and no one dies. While the book is well-written and I could see fans of the series liking it, it wasn't the book to read as an entree to Autumn Rain.