Janice Cantore: Crisis Shot

By Kelly Bridgewater

Tess O’Rourke dreams of becoming the first female chief of police in Long Beach, California. As commander of the East Division, she is well on her way . . . until the night she responds to an officer-needs-assistance call and fatally shoots an unarmed teenager. Despite being cleared of wrongdoing by a grand jury, Tess is so hounded by the public that she takes a job in Oregon to escape the bad press.
Winning over the residents of Rogue’s Hollow might be more difficult than adjusting to her new role as police chief in the small, backwater town. Especially when her closest friend, the pastor’s wife, goes missing and the woman’s cousin is found shot. Tess finds an ally in sheriff’s deputy Steve Logan, but as they track down Rogue’s Hollow’s first murderer, she worries that she’s breaking one of her rules and getting too close to him.

From Amazon

My Thoughts:

I enjoy Janice Cantore's writings because she has been an actual cop and knows what goes on behind the scenes, which she does well at bringing into her fiction stories. So when I heard that Cantore was writing a new series, I got excited. I enjoy a good mystery with a murderer and the hunt for the killer as the story moves along.

Cantore really does jump right in and include the reader in the drama. I never once doubted anything that Cantore has written about the work of the police work. She writes from experience and allows her cop characters to jump off the page with their lives' work. I could picture the setting of Rogue Hollow and the rustic backwoods small town in the northern part of Oregon. While the change in scenery is hard on Tess since she comes from South Beach, California, Cantore does a good job at allowing me to see and understand the surrounding characters feelings of this outsider.

As for the character of Tess, I felt bad for her. She was doing her job and had to move in order to keep face and make the public in California happy. The story could have been ripped from the headlines, especially with all the stories of the police injustice today. Tess moved without really any complaint and allowed herself to take over another police force, knowing she didn't feel right, but she loved her career choice, so she did it willing.

At the end of the first book, there really isn't any romance that stands out to satisfy those romance needing readers. But . . .  there might be two guys that could stand out as a potential romance in the future. I have to keep reading to find out if Cantore allows Tess to find romance in this series.

The plot. The reason I am reading the book in the first place. While I have read Cantore's stories before, so I had a good idea of how she writes and creates her stories, Crisis Shot is a lot more tame and laid back from her normal stories. In Crisis Shot, it takes a while to get to the murder of the story. While most suspense stories have the cop in danger and running for their life, Cantore doesn't write Tess as being threaten at all. Her life moves along through the interviews without once someone trying to stop her. Crisis Shot felt more like a pre-curser to the rest of the story. The beginning to the drama. I wanted more and expected more from Cantore.

Even though this novel didn't hit it out of the park for me, some other fans of romantic suspense or suspense in general might enjoy this novel.  Fans of Christy Barritt, Irene Hannon, and Colleen Coble might enjoy Crisis Shot. I'm not going to write off Cantore all together; I will still look forward to her next book.

I received a complimentary copy of Crisis Shot by Janice Cantore from Tyndale Publishing, but the opinions stated are all my own.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars