North (Hunter Squad) by Anna Hackett Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, science fiction, science fiction romance
Pages: 210
Published by Anna Hackett on April 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads
We survived the invasion and beat the aliens. But they left something behind…
I was born to protect. I’m a Connors, a soldier like my father before me, and I’m the medic for Hunter Squad. Every time we go out to hunt the mutated monsters the aliens left behind, I’m there to treat anyone who gets hurt.
But sometimes, I can’t always save everyone, and that haunts me.
When Hunter Squad is called out to rescue two missing boys, I’ll do anything to bring them home alive. Even work with our brand-new recruit, Jessica Ramos.
I’m not convinced she’s the right fit for the team, but she’s an expert when it comes to monsters. The creatures are exhibiting dangerous new behaviors, and we have to stop them. Whatever it takes.
Working alongside Jess, everything about her gets under my skin: her confidence, her intelligence, her fit, curvy body, and her damn freckles.
When old memories come back to haunt me, it’s Jess who helps me. Jess who draws me in a way no woman ever has. I can’t afford to let myself care for her.
Falling in love is not on my agenda.
My Review:
The first book in the Hunter Squad series, Jameson, set up this world as it is 30 years after the Hell Squad series came to its explosive Independence Day style ending. This second book sets up the new BIG BAD, the whoever/whatever that is somehow managing to train bands of formerly dumb and disorganized Gizzida/terran hybrids into teams capable of planning, coordinating and outright luring the human defenders into what someone or something hopes they can turn into a no-win scenario – for the humans.
In other words, the fragile – not exactly peace but not outright war – that has existed since the “pure” Gizzida got knocked back into space is heating up from a simmer back to a boil. The hybrids aren’t merely on the move – they are on the attack. And they are suddenly a whole lot better at that than they used to be – which is absolutely not a good thing for the slowly rebuilding human population.
Hunter Squad, made up of the literal ‘next generation’ of the Hell Squad, has the necessary but unenviable task of hunting down packs of Gizzida/terran hybrids who are attacking human settlements. While that’s been their job for a while, it’s only on this particular hunt that they realize that lone humans have been disappearing on an increasing basis over the past several months – because they find out what happened to a few of them and it isn’t pretty.
It’s more like Shelob in The Two Towers – only worse. Because Shelob’s depredations were mostly – not totally but mostly – about the great spider protecting her own territory and maintaining her own food supply. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that’s what nature is supposed to be – even if humans still end up on the sharp and pointy end of that cliche a lot more than they’s like.
The unnatural spiderweb-like fuckery that Hunter Squad discovers in this second entry in the series doesn’t seem to be about preserving food – but it might be about preserving specimens for exactly the sort of lab experiments that the Gizzida used to do. The kind of experiments that created the hybrids that Hunter Squad is still fighting 30 years later.
Just as the overall situation is getting darker and more dangerous, a bright, hot light blazes through this story in the burn-the-sheets sex-into-love romance between Hunter Squad’s medic, North Connors, and the squad’s newest member, Jessica Ramos.
She doesn’t want to mess up her just barely started membership in Hunter Squad. It took a lot of time and effort to get from North America to Australia, and she has a lot of important research to do on the hybrids. She can’t afford to get sidetracked by a handsome face and the body to go with it.
Especially when that handsome face seems to scrunch up in distaste every time North lays eyes on her. She’s not remotely interested in a personal relationship with someone who can’t seem to stand her presence.
It’s going to take a crisis – or two or three – for North and Jessica to figure out that they’ve been reading each other’s signals very, very wrong all along.
Escape Rating B: As with Jameson, and with the original Hell Squad series, this story runs along on two distinct tracks that intersect at – ahem – climactic moments. There’s the big, overarching plot of the series, and then there’s the romance in this particular ‘chapter’ of that story.
The romance in this one is between North Connors, son of Ash Connors and Marin Mitchell, and Jessica Ramos, one of Cruz Ramos’ cousins from North America. So they both have history to live up to, which is clearly going to be a theme of this series. North is a medic, and Jessica hunts monsters in order to study them.
This isn’t exactly a relationship made in heaven – at least not at the beginning. He has demons when it comes to not being able to save ALL his patients. He’s afraid to get close to anyone – and he’s a bit of a dick about it because Jessica gets under his skin in ways he’s not comfortable with.
Jessica may be attracted to what he looks like, but his behavior is off-putting, because, well, he’s being a dick in ways that make her believe he doesn’t have any faith in her abilities. That they fall into bed anyway and eventually into love isn’t a surprise, exactly, but damn it happened really fast. I liked the romance in Jameson better because it wasn’t instalove the way this one turned out to be.
Very much on my other hand, I’m every bit as fascinated with the overall plot as I was with the first series. It makes so much sense that, just as the humans are rebuilding, the hybrids are as well. The invading Gizzida were just that, invaders from another world. They wanted to strip Earth of its resources and leave an empty husk behind. They HAD to be fought.
But the hybrids they left behind are entirely other matter. They weren’t Gizzida enough to die when the anti-Gizzida device went off, but they’re sure not acting like they are willing to coexist peacefully either. We don’t yet know what their actual imperative is – but I expect we’re about to find out.
Which is the scary but fun part of this series. The hybrids look like they’re experimenting on humans – both in the sense of how the humans react to threats and campaigns, and quite possibly in the sense of turning some into lab rats for nefarious and/or deadly purposes.
We certainly get hints of an intelligent hybrid watching from the shadows. And I’ll admit to wondering just how hybrid that hybrid is. There are other frightening possibilities which I can’t wait for the author to explore in later books in this series.
Based on hints at the end of this story, it’s clear that the next romance will be between quadcopter pilot Colbie Erickson and her Hunter Squad teammate Marc Jackson. And that their adventure is going to take them into the heart of at least one hybrid base or experimental lab – as well as deep into each other’s hearts. I’m looking forward to getting a glimpse of whoever or whatever is behind the uptick in monster intelligence and capability in the coming books in the series.
But that’s going to be a while, because the author’s next several books look like they will be contemporary romance and romantic suspense. As always, I’m looking forward to whatever romantic reading adventures this author is sending my way in the months to come!
