Review: Red Zone by Sherri Hayes

After a case ended badly for Rebecca Carson, she’s losing her mind sitting around her apartment waiting on her superiors to allow her to return to work.  Since she was a teenager, the only thing she’d ever wanted was to join the FBI.  Now that dream was in danger.

Gage Daniels has made a pretty good life for himself.  A nice house.  A career he loves. As a professional football player, he’s used to getting almost everything he’d ever want with just the snap of his fingers.  This includes women.  A well-timed smile is usually all it takes to attract the opposite sex, especially in Nashville.

When a stalker threatens Gage, the team owner calls an old friend, Rebecca’s ex-partner Travis Hansen, to help protect his star quarterback and find the person responsible.  Hansen offers Rebecca the job, and she jumps at the chance.  It’s work, and it will get her out of her apartment.  How bad can it be?

Posing as Gage’s girlfriend, however, isn’t as easy as it seems.  The man is relentless.  Rebecca must work to protect Gage while staving off his advances.  She’s there to do a job, nothing more.  The last thing she wants is to be another notch on a hotshot athlete’s belt.

As the stalker continues to up the ante, Rebecca finds it harder and harder to keep her distance from Nashville’s star quarterback.  He isn’t what she expected in one of the city’s most notorious playboys.  Now all she has to do is keep him safe until they can find his stalker, and hope she doesn’t lose her heart in the process.

Review

This is the first book by Sherri Hayes I’ve read.  It will DEFINITELY not be the last.  Red Zone is the second book in the Daniels Brothers series, but you don’t have to read the first book before reading this one if you haven’t.  I didn’t read the first and everything is still perfectly fine.  For those readers who fell in love with Chris and Elizabeth from Behind Closed Doors, you get a little glimpse of them in this book.

I love Sherri’s book dedication.  She dedicated the book to her dad, who helped her develope a love of football.  That’s something I can totally relate to.

Gage Lucas Daniels is the cocky quarterback for a professional Nashville football team.  He’s young and successful and can have any woman he wants.  Well, actually, he has quite a few women, which leads to him having a stalker.  Rebecca Carson is a straight-laced, by the book, FBI agent, who investigates missing children.  After her last case went south, she’s on administrative leave, sitting at home bored out of her mind waiting to be reinstated.

Rebecca and Gage are introduced to each other by Travis Hansen, who was Rebecca’s former FBI partner and mentor.  Rebecca and Travis were hired by Timothy Donovan, the owner of the team Gage plays for, after he discovers the stalker has upped the ante against Gage.  In order to catch the stalker and protect Gage, Rebecca has to pretend to be his girlfriend.

From the beginning, Gage was attracted to Rebecca and tried to hit on her and it did not work.  Rebecca did her best to not show any interest in Gage, even though they both knew that she was.  But of course with his good looks and cockiness, he won her over with a little help from Rebecca’s sister Megan.

Figuring out the stalker's identity was pretty easy after the person was introduced.  I, for one, got the feeling something was off.  But the reason why Gage was being stalked in the first place and the events which transpired afterwards were not things I expected.

I love watching characters grow.  Gage isn’t really the cocky guy he likes everyone to think he is.  He truly has a heart of gold for his family and anyone else he cares about.  Rebecca, for her part, is also protective of those she cares about.  Because of Gage, she’s learned to let her hair down literally and figuratively and not always be the “FBI Agent” 24/7.

I am so looking forward to going back and reading the first book in the series, Behind Closed Doors and any other Daniels brothers stories Sherri has lined up for us.

Rating: 4

Release Date: Available Now
Book Length: 232 pages
Source: Publisher
Reading Format: Available only in eBook and Paperback

Stay connected with Sherry Hayes:

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Buy Link: TWCS | Amazon Paperback | Amazon Kindle

Books in the Daniels Brothers Series

1. Behind Closed Doors

Click HERE for my interview with Sherri.

Sherri is the author of four novels: Hidden Threat, Slave (Finding Anna Book 1), Need (Finding Anna Book 2), Behind Closed Doors (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), Red Zone (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), and a short story, A Christmas Proposal.  She lives in central Ohio with her husband and three cats.  Her mother fostered her love for books at a young age by reading to her as a child.  Stories have been floating around in her head for as long as she can remember; however, she didn’t start writing them down until she turned thirty.  It has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions, while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create.  When she’s not writing, she can usually be found helping her husband in his woodworking shop.