Reviewed by Elizabetta
TITLE: Hostile Ground
AUTHOR: L.A. Witt and Aleksandr Voinov
PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing
LENGTH: 300 pages
BLURB: After the deaths of three undercover cops investigating a drug ring in a seedy strip club in Seattle, Detective Mahir Hussain has been sent to finish the job. He joins the club’s security team in the hopes of finding enough evidence to bust the operation before the men in charge find a reason to put him in a shallow grave. To protect the strippers, only gay men can work the club. Ridley, the cold and intimidating head of security, knows exactly how to test potential new hires-including Mahir. From the minute they meet, Mahir and Ridley engage in a dangerous dance of sex and mind games. Mahir needs to find his evidence before Ridley figures out he’s a cop-and before they both grow too close to betray one another.
As the game goes on, Mahir burrows deeper into the operation, where he learns there’s much more happening than meets the eye . . . and why every cop who made it this far has been silenced with a bullet.
REVIEW:
There are some things that work for me in this book, and some that don’t.
The first thing that hits me, that I really like, is the duality. Mahir, our deep undercover cop investigating a strip club for drug running, is of Arabic descent and a Muslim. So, he stands out, already carries the weight of that, living in the U.S. post 9/11.
For me, Mahir is the most interesting thing in the story.
He, of course, has to assume an alias, a persona he is constantly at odds with. To prove himself to the strip club’s head-of-security, Ridley, Mahir-a.k.a.-Saeed has to do stuff a cop shouldn’t feel comfortable doing. He is a clean cop, loyal, ethical, sensitive. But he has drugs and sex thrown at him as a test. And, Mahir is in the closet/gay; he gets hired at the strip club because he’s gay… complicated. It seems the club owner doesn’t want anyone screwing around (literally) with the women strippers. So gay security is the way to go.
Arabic descent, Muslim, and gay under-operative… things get even more complicated for Mahir when he figures out that Ridley plays for the same team.
The case: Three cops have been killed working undercover at the strip club. It seems that selling lap dances is just the tip of the dirty business the club is involved in. Mahir/Saeed is told at the beginning that Ridley is responsible for rooting out and offing the undercover cops. This is how Ridley gets the rep at the club of being a hard-ass killer you don’t want to mess with. How the authors reckon this with a budding romance/sexing-up between two seemingly very disparate men is what kept me reading.
So Mahir starts work as club security and it doesn’t take long before he realizes that stripping and prostitution are just the tip of what’s going on in the club. And some pretty heavy stuff starts brewing between him and Ridley. There are frequent hook ups in Ridley’s office at the club to get things hot and steamy. Mahir/Saeed wants to find out what’s up with Ridley. Ridley wants to get-off.
I think what held me back from romance-magic is that it all happened so quickly. Mahir/Saeed shows up for a job interview at the club, passes the test by giving head to Ridley, and then, BAM, they’re fucking regularly. In Ridley’s office. In the middle of this nest of viper-bad criminals. It’s obvious there is a physical connection but why should two inherently suspicious, closed-down, professional guys make that jump so quickly? There wasn’t enough on the page to convince me. And the constant danger of it made it less believable.
Of course it’s that danger, that danger of being caught… that makes it hot for Mahir and Ridley. Duality. They are hot together, they do walk a thin moral line in the work they do, and they are, each of them, interesting characters, but as a couple… Ridley remains a mystery… I just didn’t feel it.
I did find Mahir and his personal and family issues and how they get tangled up in the job, to be the most interesting element here. The danger that he puts himself and his family in, to do his job, makes for some great tension. How far he goes in endangering them through some pretty stupid actions of his own makes for great reading SPOILER (The endangerment of an underage child was particularly gripping but hard to read.)
The chatty, over-written style where we are privy to the characters’ every inner thought and every action doesn’t help much– it doesn’t allow much mystery to them. It reminds me of other widely popular stories and characters that I have similar issues with… Abigail Roux’ Cut & Run, SE Jake’s Hell or High Water series. Those are also all about guys who hop to it, often without thinking, and all of them undercover agents working dangerous jobs. I’m thinking that for me this combo doesn’t work as well as it does for many other readers. If you are a fan of these series in this undercover/spy romance genre, then you will probably really enjoy Hostile Ground. For me, it was a mixed bag.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: