As an employee of MacBain Security and Solutions, Claire Kelly can certainly hold her own. Armed with an impressive set of covert skills, she’s more than prepared to tackle any job that comes her way…except one involving Cooper Lockman.
Cooper and Claire used to work together before his feelings for her sent him packing to Europe for six long years. But now he’s back and determined to ignore the still-smoldering heat that lingers between them.
Their current mission: go undercover together at a California high school to root out the mastermind behind a prostitution ring targeting young girls. The closer they get to the truth and the closer they get to each other, however, the deadlier their task becomes. As Claire and Cooper risk their lives to bring down their target, will their hearts be the final casualties?
Release Date: Mar 23, 2021
Series: Richter
Book: 1
Heat Level: Warm/Sensual
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Imprint: Montlake
Price: $4.99
Changing the Rules is the first book in the Richter series by Catherine Bybee. The book is about a group of private investigators brought in to work on a case of missing teenage girls. The team must infiltrate the local high schools to find out the players in the plot to kidnap and prostitute vulnerable teenagers. The team sends in two female members pretending to be high school seniors and one male member pretending to be a teacher.
The lead female character, Claire Kelly, is a competent, lethal, trained assassin, who happens to be petite and young looking. Six years prior, at the age of eighteen, she is rescued from a military style training academy pretending to be a strict boarding school. When she started her employment with MacBain Securities and Solutions, she started a friendship with co-worker, Cooper Lockman. He fell for her, hard, but was discouraged from pursuing a relationship with her due to her age and recent experiences. So, Cooper took a post in the company’s Europe office. Now that he is back, he can no longer resist his pull towards Claire.
I found the book to be disjointed with many plots and sub plots. The writing was not particularly descriptive outside of the basics. I had a difficult time understanding the back story of the characters. There are two couples that have joined up in other stories. There is the back story of the military style boarding school, which is touched upon several times throughout this book, but I felt it lacked enough explanation to fully understand Claire’s background. The characters from the private investigator group are interesting but are not believable as high school students. For instance, one of women goes out for track. Supposedly, she has never run track yet she is the best on the team. Right, not believable. There are some positives. The story progressed at a fairly good pace. Once the investigation kicked up a notch the story was more enjoyable. If you are looking for a love story this one has one but its rather basic. There is a great deal of angst about Cooper not wanting to appear to be a teacher lusting after a student, so they must sneak around to hide their relationship. There is one sex scene, and again it is pretty basic.
~ Andrea