Four years ago, Sophie Parker and Damon Wolfe spent one night together and never saw each other again. When Sophie’s father is murdered, she discovers a cryptic voicemail left by him where he leaves clues to a scavenger hunt to find items related to his murder. He also instructs her not to trust anyone, especially his coworkers at the FBI. Damon, now an agent in the New York FBI office, is stunned when he learns that his mentor has been killed and his daughter is missing. Damon hasn’t spoken to Sophie since their night together but he knows he has to find and help her. Considering her father’s message not to trust anyone at the Agency, will Sophie believe Damon has come to help her?
This is the first book in the Off the Grid: FBI series. It’s also the first book I’ve read by Barbara Freethy. This book is a romantic suspense with a bit of a second chance reunion between Sophie and Damon.
I really liked the characters in this book. I did not find Sophie to be your stereotypical damsel in distress. I thought Damon was competent and I appreciated how well he could do his job. The side characters, primarily two FBI agents that Damon knows from Quantico, were interesting and I think they will be compelling characters in future books.
I did read this all in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down and I needed to know who the bad guys were. This is a romance so you know there’s going to be a happily ever after. I just really wanted to know who the bad guys were, why Sophie’s father was killed, and what the story was. Honestly, I was hoping to find out at the end that Sophie’s father had faked his death but unfortunately he does die.
A lot of the book is kind of a road trip. Sophie and Damon go to the lake house that Sophie spent a lot of time at as a child and then they travel to New Haven, CT. And then they spend the night at an old friend’s house and then they drive back to New York. There is a lot of driving in this book, all while being pursued by the bad guys.
What I liked was that, as the reader, we have the same information (or no information as it is) that Sophie has. We don’t know who to trust or who might be an accomplice to Sophie’s father’s murder. We don’t find out who the bad guys are until the end of the book so I often found myself thinking “Don’t talk to that person! Don’t tell them where you’re going!” I had a hard time trusting anyone that Sophie came in contact with.
The only thing that confused me a bit was the question of why the bad guys were after Sophie. Before Sophie even listens to her father’s voicemail, the bad guys are hunting her down which made me question “Why?” No one knew that he had called Sophie, no one knew that she would go off on this scavenger hunt, so why was she in danger? I finally concluded that they thought she had information about them or that her dad had told her what he was doing. But that’s just my guess.
This book is a good introduction to the set up of the series.
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