Hold Your Breath

February 22, 2016
Ruggle’s energetic first Search and Rescue romance introduces an ice-rescue dive team in the Rocky Mountains. Louise “Lou” Sparks escaped her calculating fiancé and controlling mother back east and eagerly joined the SAR crew near her new home in Colorado. Lou is ditzy and inexperienced but enthusiastic about her new responsibilities, even when she discovers a dead body on a routine jump into a frozen reservoir. Determined to solve the mystery of this corpse before the police do, Lou is suddenly dogged by a stalker, triggering the protective impulses of her stern team captain, Callum Cook. He offers to help with the investigation. Their developing romance is punctuated by threats from a killer. Puppy-like Lou manages to soften dour Callum, and she rises to the occasion when her newly acquired rescue skills are all that stand between Callum and death. The characters are not very well developed, but romantic suspense fans will enjoy the unusual setting, and Ruggle’s ice-rescue certification adds an element of authenticity to the rescue descriptions.

March 1, 2016
Lou Sparks is a new recruit to the Field County Rescue Dive Team in Colorado, and an escapee from her Connecticut family's expectations that she become a lawyer and marry her ex-boyfriend. She is also the seemingly wacky antithesis of the very orderly dive-team leader, Callum, whom she considers a cross between a gladiator and a drill sergeant. Despite being convinced that she drives him crazy, she is forced to accept his help during a series of attacks on her property and person, and they wind up as lovers. The love story grows along with another mysterythe HDG (headless dead guy) Lou knocks loose on one of their training dives. The setting and ensemble of characters are interesting, and it's great fun to watch two such different people fall for each other despite quirks, like perfectly aligned bacon (Callum) and hippo-patterned flannel pajamas (Lou). With the promise of the HDG case returning in a subsequent book in Ruggle's Search and Rescue series, this is a good read with romantic, not graphic, sex scenes, and thrilling diving sequences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)