Book Review – Hard Target (Wrecked Guardians 1) by Kelly Fox

Book Blurb:

Everett: There are a ton of reasons why falling for my tiny, adorkable best friend is a terrible idea—starting with the body in my trunk. I have other reasons—he still mourns his late husband, I’m way older, he’s a foot shorter, my tattoo shop is a front, and he’s an assistant professor at UT. Still, I can’t help but think we’d be perfect for each other if I didn’t kill people (very, very bad people) for a living.

Rafi: How the f*ck did I not realize how hot my best friend is? Yeah, grief, or whatever, but were my eyes not working? Silver fox, check. Tattooed hotness, check. Cuddles with me on Monday nights while we watch Australian melodramas, check. Says he’s not a good person but totally is, check.

New goal: Get Everett to stop looking at me like a grieving widower and start seeing me as someone he’d like to pin against the wall.
Now if I only knew what was behind the door marked Portal to Nowhere…

Book Review

I was half expecting, from the title, to read a book about the hunt for human flesh, the greatest game on earth. Jean Claude Van Damme reference aside, Hard Target is the first in the Wrecked: Guardians series, yet it reads as if I were jumping into a story in the middle of a series. It was weird. I even rechecked the “about this book” portion to make sure I wasn’t reading a second or third book in a continuation series accidentally. 

Once I managed to make it past the beginning, which felt more like a middle, I started to feel more connected to the characters. There was a lot of snark in the book, from both the characters, so I was a little thrown off by the tone and how much they sounded like each other in their heads. 

Rafi and Everett are physically different, but substantially the same. They both come from a military background, with experience in special forces. That is the common ground that they share. Their physical juxtaposition is what makes their chemistry pretty hot. 

Everett has been lusting after Rafi for the better part of a year. Rafi has been grieving his husband and has been living under a proverbial rock, oblivious to the sexual tension Everett is putting off.

Rafi is supposed to be a professor at UT Austin, yet somehow, that is the thing we see the least of about Rafi, like I don’t even know how that comes into play for this character since

When Rafi finally wakes up to the idea that he does, in fact, want to have relations with his friend Everett, there is a bunch of weird montage sequences where his friend Parker attempts to help him get his fashion sense under control. Where he swings from trap/jail bait to gay urban cowboy. It is really confusing.