Hard to Forget
Author: Incy Black
Series: #2 in the Hard To… series
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Review Copy Provided by Publisher
Description:
A warning ignored…a love denied
Four years ago, Commander Jack Ballantyne followed Special Agent Lowry Fisk into a death trap. Fortunately, both of them lived to tell the tale, but when he had Lowry drummed out of the British Intelligence Service for her own safety—and his own peace of mind—he knew she’d never forgive him.
Lowry Fisk knew, she just knew, that the Assassins, the secret black-ops unit of the Service she and Jack belonged to, had a mole. And as the Assassins Commander, Jack should have believed her, even though she had little evidence beyond a gut feeling. But when he hadn’t, she’d taken it upon herself to find the traitor—and ended up assaulted, shot, and left for dead. Jack had come to her rescue, but it had been too little, too late. Now all she wants to do is forget the attack, the Service, and the sexy, steely-eyed Commander with the power to make her feel weak.
But the mole is on the move, and he’s coming for Lowry to finish what he started. Jack has to get the stubborn, dangerously gorgeous woman to let him back into her life and allow him the Assassins to protect her—without allowing her to worm her way into his heart
Review:
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for Secret Agent storylines – I mean, who doesn’t love James Bond and those types of characters? so when I came across the description of Incy Black’s series in an email from her publisher, I was intrigued. Since this was the 2nd in the series, I opted to go back and read the first one before picking up this one (although the author did say when I tweeted her, that this could be read as a stand-alone – and looking back, I agree). In fact, after I finished reading the first book (while not bad, it just had some things that didn’t work for me), I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pick up Hard to Forget, but I’m glad I did – because I enjoyed it more than the first.
There were times when I wanted to take both Jack and Lowry’s heads and clang them together to have some sense knocked into them, because man did they both do some silly stuff – both prior to the book’s main setting (told in flashbacks) and during the main portion of the book. But even with that, Lowry wasn’t the typical TSTL heroine that you see, who ends up getting herself into trouble and needs to be rescued – in fact, it was her willingness to do whatever was needed for the mission to be accomplished that actually made me like her.
My main issue with the book was Jack – he was, for lack of a better word, a jackass – and honestly, it took me about 3/4 of the book before I even really started to not hate him as a character, and even then, he was barely redeemed by the end. I just didn’t think that he did anything during the course of the book to really warrant Lowry forgiving him for how he had acted in the past.
Even with my issues with Jack, I gave Hard to Forget 3.5 stars, which was an improvement on the previous book. I’m interested to see where she takes the series, and more importantly, I want to know if Will (who has been a secondary character in both books so far) is going to get his own story – because he needs one.
Designed for Love
Someone Else’s Fairytale
Long Way Home
Hollywood on Tap
There was quite a bit of discussion throughout the blogging community on how we (the universal we) wanted to handle the situation. Were we going to quit blogging completely and lock blogs down? Would we limit reviews to authors who were well-established (although that in and of itself isn’t a guarantee of good behavior)? Or was there an alternative option? Ultimately, a review blackout was proposed and accepted by many bloggers and while we continued to discuss bookish things, no new book reviews would be published during an identified period. Some bloggers opted for a week-long blackout, others for longer. Katiebabs has a good discussion of the #BloggerBlackout 
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