This review is also available on my blog: Wine Cellar Library

First, I would like to thank Amazon First Reads for the opportunity to read a free Kindle version of this book.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much positive to say in regards to The Rescue. The fact that it took me over two weeks to read a 390-page book is an indication of how unsatisfying this read was. The first few chapters are action-packed, but once we hit chapter 15, the story becomes dull and all action completely stops until the very end (there are 65 chapters in total).

The premise of the book is unbelievable: we are expected to accept that a senator would destroy the life of the man who led the mission to rescue her daughter simply because his mission failed, and we are expected to accept that the legal system would lock him away for 10 years for not saving her in time. We are expected to accept that all of his comrades in World Recovery Group and their families were brutally slaughtered after trial and that no one did anything about it or realized that perhaps Ryan Decker was not to blame after all. We are also supposed to see Ryan Decker as a badass, but it seems to me that the real badasses are Harlow and her team and Ryan Decker is just along for the ride. (A spin-off series about Harlow and her team is something I would definitely read, by the way.)

It’s not a bad story, it’s just nothing new in the action genre. A brief explanation of how exactly the legal system found Ryan Decker guilty of…well, whatever charges he was supposedly guilty of, as the charges are not named either, come to think of it…would have set this story up for success. This gaping hole in the plot gnawed at me the entire duration of the book and it was difficult for me to take the rest of it seriously.