Connelly's Flame by Alilyah Burke

Connelly's Flame (The Megalodon Team, #3) by Aliyah Burke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally, I've started this series. I am smacking my head and asking what took me so long. Navy SEALs, interracial. Am I crazy? Well, I have rectified my mistake, and I am a happy camper.

This was a really good book. Aliyah Burke is an excellent writer. Her voice is authentic and polished to the eyes, making for an enjoyable reading experience. Her characters are real life and likable, flaws and all. I loved Dezarae. She was unique and interesting. Her ethnicity was a part of who she was, but she was in no way a stereotype. I liked that she was normal-sized with muscles from the physical work she did, and she was sexy with it. I loved her independence and the fact that she was good at doing something she loved--restoring cars. I've never been into cars, but movies like Gone in 60 Seconds, XXX, and the Fast and the Furious movies have pricked my interest. I recognized the Shelby from Gone in 60 Seconds, which was awesome. I seriously love a heroine who has her own life going on, but at the same time, she's open and warm. Dezarae opened her heart and her life to Ross in two huge ways: she saved his life, and she gave his daughter a safe, warm home. How could you not love her? Another thing I loved about this book was how many male friends she had (and no, not in dirty-minded way). I like to see women having male friends and being able to fit into that world easily because of their mutual interests. They respected her for her personality and her car savvy. They accepted her for who she was and she was happy in her own skin. People do want to be around you when you are confident and outgoing, so it makes total sense. It makes me wonder if I need to get into this kind of hobby so I meet more guys (I'm kidding, mostly)! Too bad I don't have a bit of mechanical car sense other than how not to get ripped off by car mechanics! Anyway, Dezarae had wonderful texture and I loved her as a heroine. I would have loved to understand why she had trouble believing Ross really loved her. I'm guessing it had something to do with her failed relationship with Jack, but this isn't explained. Maybe the fear of loss from her father dying...

Ross was not only deliciously hot, he was a genuinely nice guy. He cracked me up with his possessive jealousy. I like that in a hero, and I like that he wasn't too irrational about it. He had to deal with the fact that his woman was the kind of woman that men liked being around, even on a platonic basis. For all of that, he didn't try to change her or mold her to fit his preconceived notions. He really found her sexy for who she was. I think he was a very good dad, and I liked seeing him with his daughter Charmane (and I feel her part added significantly to the book, and she wasn't just a plot point), and how natural it felt for them as a family with Dezarae. He did have some insecurities about being low on the totem pole in his Team, but he wasn't aggravating about it. Towards the end, he was tripping out some, but I forgive him!

As far as romance rating, I rate this high. It's very steamy and that was great. Burke writes great love scenes: hot and sensual without being a turnoff because of the raunch factor. The steam shows the feelings and the growing love between Dezarae and Ross. You could see although there was intense chemistry between them from the beginning, they don't jump right into bed, which was great. They give their feelings time to be real and not just about sex. And when they do get intimate, it's so much better!


I can tell that Burke does have some real-life understanding of the military. She writes a sexy, credible Navy SEAL hottie hero, but it feels realistic and deals with the hard realities of that life. I loved the friendship between Ross and his Team, and how they open up ranks around his new-found love. Although I haven't read the first two books, seeing the couples from those makes me eager to read them very soon. Of course, I will make sure I get all the books in this series (I think I have most of them already), because I definitely want to read more of SEAL Team Megalodon and the women they love.

I guess I'll have to give this five stars, 'cause I really liked it a lot!

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SEAL Team 666 by Weston Ochse

SEAL Team 666: A Novel by Weston Ochse

My rating: 3.25 of 5 stars


Jack Walker’s dream was to be a Navy SEAL. He was going to make it through BUD/S training, no matter how much it punished his body. Just four more weeks.  But he’s pulled out of training early, and drafted into an ultra-secret, elite SEAL team, one that has an unusual team number.  This team fights threats against the free world that are supernatural in origin.  And Jack is specially equipped to be a member.  For the dark scars of his youth mark him with a special ability to sense evil. 

I liked the idea of this book, a military special ops story with a supernatural twist.  Ochse’s attention to detail as far as military ops lends credibility to the writing.  I really appreciated the look at how a SEAL team operates and the whole involved procedure of keeping the world safe, top secret-style, with the ancillary support of various defense agency personnel.  His focus seems to be more on this than the supernatural component, but he grafts together the two aspects of the story fairly well.  Still this book seemed thin to me.  Like it was serviceable, but merely scratching the surface of possibilities.  Yes, I think that was the big issue I had with this book. It lacked depth.

I wanted more character exploration.  While I felt I did get to know Jack fairly well, I didn’t get more than a surface portrayal of most of the others.  I realize that the story occurs in a short period of time, but I had this feeling that the characters merely existed to move the story, or to get killed off.  That saddened me.  The death of a team member and the ritual associated with his passing, had more time spent on it than seeing that team member as a living, breathing human.  Of course, death is an everyday experience for these men.  They know they could die on any mission they undertake.  But I needed to know them better, because knowing someone is part of the process of caring for them, that they live and die for a purpose.  Otherwise, our mental health defenses build a wall between us and the suffering of others in the world, because to cry for every person who dies will destroy you. We just don’t have that capacity.    But if you know someone, even a little, it breaks your heart to know they have died.  To introduce a character only to kill them without much effort to infuse depth makes a mockery of that.  I really dislike the tendency towards presenting characters as sacrificial lambs in a story. Just enough to introduce a character and then they get killed off.  I felt this was a shortcoming of this novel.

The action is well done.  The pace was intense and appropriate.  I got the real sense that I was going on ops with these guys.  In this case, all in relation to the supernatural threats in this book.   If even possible, that brings a higher level of threat to the situation.  There’s only so much a gun can do against an undead, immortal threat, or one from a world of strangeness that doesn’t follow the rules that govern this physical one.

The supernatural storyline was intriguing and definitely horrific.  Ochse does build the sense of wrongness and weirdness that would disturb an average person.    I like a weird supernatural story like nobody’s business, but I had some moments where I was thinking, “That’s just wrong!” Imagine being a SEAL, trained to eliminate lethal threats all around the world, but previously naïve to the supernatural darkness in this world. You have to keep moving and do your job, and you don’t have time for “WTFs”.    So yes, that part was very well done.  The particular threat they faced in this book felt novel and very intimidating, and the author ties it into things going on in the world arena.  While the climax was too abrupt for my tastes, it definitely had impact, and as I said, I enjoyed the action moments.

With this book, I had that feeling that everything was scratching the surface when I wanted things to get deeper. With an intriguing storyline like this, I get excited to see what journey the author will take me on.  Overall, this was a book that kept me reading.  It was a pretty good book.   A nice mélange of spec ops action and supernatural weirdness.  I think the author could have given me more as far as characterization, which is the biggest shortcoming of this novel.  However, I would keep reading this if it becomes a series.

Overall rating: 3.25/5.0 stars.



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