Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Can a couple be more opposite than a thief and a cop? Or do they have more in common than they think?

 

Mattias Dumont stole to survive. He was damn good at it. But there’s no such thing as a victimless crime, and when he saw how his theft hurt people, he resolved to change. Now he works as a consultant, and while helping to investigate a rash of burglaries, he crosses paths with James.

 

Police Officer James Levinson doesn’t trust thieves, and that includes Mattias. James’s father stole to support himself, and James knows firsthand how that can destroy lives—it inspired him to go into law enforcement. Mattias is no different, from what he can tell… at first. 

 

As they work together, Mattias and James realize there’s something deeper between them than just the physical attraction neither can deny. Given time, they might even grow to trust each other—unless the case they’re working on dredges up pasts both would rather forget. 

 

Book Review

"Opposites attract" is a popular idiom used to explain why people who seem very different often end up working well together – in a professional as well as a romantic context. ‘Fire and Obsidian’ is a perfect illustration of how this might work in law enforcement. Mattias is a former thief and James is a detective with a particular, well-founded disdain for thieves. When they are selected to work on a particularly tough ring of thieves in Carlisle and the surrounding towns, they discover not just a rather unexpected common interest, but also some pretty hard-to-fight attraction. The situation made for some fireworks and interesting discussions even before all the twists and turns the author added to the story – resulting in a very entertaining read.

Mattias is a former thief who never got caught but no longer wants to take people’s hopes and livelihoods since he has realized that “There is no such thing as a victimless crime”. It was interesting to spend time in his head to see what he used to feel when he stole things, from the “high” to a sense of achievement he wasn’t able to get anywhere else. Mattias grew up in the foster system so part of his reason for becoming a successful thief was finding something he was good at which allowed him to make a living of sorts. Now he gets the same sort of satisfaction from solving crimes and using his talent to help people.

James is a law man through and through. He is an overachiever, likes to work alone, and needs to be the best at everything he does. His father is a thief and James hates what that did to the family, so his contempt for the criminals he has been tasked to catch as well as for Mattias has very personal causes. James has also been told to show that he can work in a team if he wants to be promoted – and he can’t understand why that is useful when he is so much better than anyone else. He has much to learn, and it was particularly fun to watch him develop a new understanding of and appreciation for working with people who know what they are doing just as much as he does.

Rather than actual deputies of the Carlisle police department, Mattias and James are two consultants from opposite ends of the spectrum – and this made for an interesting variation in the series theme. With the focus on local issues in the town of Carlisle and some of the characters from previous volumes making an appearance, this latest sequel is still an excellent fit. The romance is very slow-burn, some of the personal issues between Mattias and James are very real and made it seem impossible they’d ever become a couple, and the suspense as to the crimes they need to solve certainly kept my attention.

If you like character-based stories with lots of change and growth, if you think a thief and a detective are an extremely unlikely pair and are curious to find out how they figure out how to be a couple, and if you’re looking for a read full of action, suspense, underlying tension, and some very funny moments, then you will probably like this novel.

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the publisher or author. This book has been provided by Dreamspinner Press for the purpose of a review.

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 193 pages/62698 words
Heat Level
Publication Date	07-May-2019
Price	$6.99 ebook, $14.99 paperback, $14.99 bundle
Buy Link	https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/books/fire-and-obsidian-by-andrew-grey-10431-b