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

Book Blurb:

A tattooed silver fox running a tattoo shop as a front for contract killing. His tiny, adorkable best friend who is absolutely not supposed to be a love interest. A body in a trunk and a door labeled “Portal to Nowhere.” Hard Target is the first book in Kelly Fox’s Wrecked: Guardians series, and on paper the setup is exactly the kind of delightfully unhinged MM romance premise I will absolutely pick up without hesitation: best friends to lovers, massive size difference, a man who kills very bad people but cuddles on the couch for Monday night Australian melodramas. Whether the execution matched that premise is what we’re here to discuss.

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. 

I am cutting the book some slack since it is the first in a series, and it took a little while for the two characters and their relationship to gather momentum and go somewhere. But once they finally get together, it is rather explosive and super hot. I skipped through some of the more technical

since that is what Everett obsesses about, which holds him back from retrying to connect with Rafi before Rafi falls on his proverbial dick and moves the story along.

I am sure it is essential to the overall series, but that was my least favorite portion of the plot. 

I’d give it a solid 3.5 stars.

Hard Target (Wrecked: Guardians 1) is available on Kindle Unlimited. Read the Wrecked: Guardians series by Kelly Fox.