Dead End by Mariah Stewart

I really enjoyed the Dead series by Mariah Stewart and looked forward to reading Dead End when I heard it was coming out. Except....in hardback??? I was especially confused when I learned that she had another suspense trilogy coming out in paperback. Now why on earth would you put the sequel to a paperback series in hardback and then go right on to another series in paperback. Makes my head spin. Okay, on to my thoughts about the book.

Book blurb:

Two years ago, a major FBI undercover drug deal suddenly went south– and special agent Dylan Shields went down in a hail of bullets. When the dust cleared, his fellow agent (and fiancée) Anne Marie McCall was left alone with too many unanswered questions and nothing to do but hit the job as hard as she could to dull the pain. Only now is she beginning to ease up on her punishing routine as a Bureau profiler and starting to let some light in again. and. Detective Evan Crosby had a lot to do with drawing Annie back into life, and she’s not about to let her chance at happiness with him slip away.

But before she can embrace a bright new future, she must grapple with the dangerous past whose demons of doubt and suspicion won’t let her sleep at night . . . and whose dead will never rest in peace until someone digs up the truth and deals out the payback. That means going places where no one– including the FBI–wants Annie to be and cutting through a minefield of smoke and mirrors, politics and intimidation, dirty tricks and deadly threats, in order to make a cold case hot enough to get the right people sweating. The harder Annie squeezes, the more blood, lies, and betrayal she wrings out . . . and the closer she comes to connecting a face to the trigger finger that blew away her dreams–and Dylan Shields. What she doesn’t know is that the killer she’s closing in on is looking for closure too. The kind that only Annie’s death can bring.

Okay, people who read the Dead series will recognize almost all the characters here and also the mystery of Dylan's murder. Because of the large cast of characters (there are a lot of Shieldses), I really don't think this book stands completely alone. It's definitely recommended that you read the Dead trilogy beforehand. But read the series, cuz it's good. Anyways, I enjoyed the story as a nice wrap up to the other series. Not that they needed a wrap-up, but it was nice to see the characters again.

Now...I think the Dead series was marketed as romantic suspense. Here, there's romance, but Annie and Evan are already committed to each other and you know they'll stick together. So the emphasis is on the suspense plot, not romance. Fine with me, but I know I've seen people complain about romantic suspense in the past not having enough romance.

So...I liked the story, but definitely wait til paperback and after you've read the previous three Dead books.

Now I can't wait for the Truth trilogy. I've already got the first one, Cold Truth.