We survived the invasion and beat the aliens. But they left something behind…
Killing monsters is what I do. Like my father before me, I fight side by side with my twin brother and my squad to protect our people.
Since the invasion, life is dangerous. I know how short it can be, so I live it to the fullest. I work hard on Hunter Squad, I party harder, I love a joke and a good time, and I never get tangled up in relationships. I watched my father’s grief at losing his brother. I almost lost my own twin. I’ll never let myself get in too deep.
Then our squad’s pilot crashes alone in monster-infested mountains.
Tiny, opinionated Colbie who’s the best pilot I know. A fierce redhead who never hesitates to stand up to me.
Everything changes. Every protective instinct I have is in overdrive. I have to find her and bring her home.
I’ll risk it all—monsters, raging rivers, dangerous terrain—but when the two of us are alone and fighting for survival, I realize that what’s most at risk is the one thing I’ve always guarded—my heart.

My Review:

This third book in the Hunter Squad series, after Jameson and North, takes a classic case of jeopardy and mixes it with an equally classic romance trope. Then it stirs the pot – and plot – by adding what appears to be the full reveal of the series’ overall big bad to create a pulse-pounding sci-fi adventure romance with a whole lot of heart at its, well, heart.

Colbie Erickson, the daughter of Hell Squad Hawk pilot Finn Erickson and Hell Squad drone pilot Lia Murphy, has followed in her dad’s footsteps – or perhaps that’s wings – to become the go-to pilot for Hell Squad’s successors, Hunter Squad. So when her quadcopter goes down in dangerous territory during a medical supplies run, Hunter Squad immediately deploys to find her.

Not that the whole squad doesn’t both respect AND care for her, but there’s something about Colbie that’s special to one Hunter Squad member in particular, Marc Jackson. Marc has never been able to stop thinking about Colbie, but he’s also never been able to stop thinking about the grief that his dad, Gabe Jackson, has lived with since the loss of his twin brother during the original Gizzida invasion. Marc keeps all his relationships one-night only and no strings attached because he’s afraid to get close to anyone.

He knows that Colbie deserves better than that. More importantly, so does Colbie.

But when Hunter Squad’s rescue of Colbie results in the discovery of a new Gizzida-Terran hybrid experimental base in the ruins of Hell Squad’s old Blue Mountain Base, the bond they have spent years trying to suppress flares to life. Because now, Colbie’s not just a squadmate he needles and teases and walks away from (to party with someone else), now she’s someone who has saved his life AND had his back in more than one firefight.

His head believes that he can’t risk the loss if something happens to her, but his heart has already taken that ride and isn’t coming back. The only question is whether he can get his head out of his angst enough to tell her how he feels before she walks away.

Or before the next time the monsters come out to play with them all. For keeps.

Escape Rating A-: So, I’m still not all that fond of the covers for this series. However, this third entry really hit a sweet spot for me and I’m very glad of it. I think that now that the ‘big bad’ has reared his ugly head (literally) in this follow up to the author’s Hell Squad series, the whole thing just reached back and grabbed that same set of vibes by the tail – and then set them on fire.

(Yes, I know I mixed my metaphors something fierce, but it worked for me. Just go with it.)

There are three elements that made this one work for me where the last one didn’t quite.

First is that the relationship between Colbie and Marc isn’t instalove or instalust. They’ve known each other forever, they’ve always been friends or at least friendly and have always gotten along. They tease each other, but it’s never mean-spirited and always done in friendship even if that friendship is also designed – by Marc – to keep Colbie at arm’s length.

Colbie may want more, but she wants more in a way that Marc obviously doesn’t. And she’s smart enough to know that and keep her heart safe as long as they maintain that slight distance.

The reasons they have kept to friendship feel real and organic to the story and their characters. The message she got from her parents’ relationship is just how terrific and supportive a forever love can be. The message Marc got from his dad is that grief never ends. Not that Gabe Jackson doesn’t love his wife and his family, but he’s never gotten over the loss of his twin and never will. Which doesn’t mean that he hasn’t had a fulfilling life, but that Marc has taken the wrong lesson from what he’s observed.

The relationship that develops between Colbie and Marc is a relationship of equals. The squad comes to get her, but she and Marc rescue each other. They’re not holding each other back AND they’re not pushing each other into places they don’t want to be.

And very much on my third hand, or claw, or whatever the Gizzida-Terran hybrids have, the new front in the old war heats up in this story in a fantastic way. In the first two books in this series, the fight was a bit, well, amorphous. It needed to happen, it was clearly happening, but to make it into a good story it needed a focus – and now it has one.

The potential is that it’s going to be even bloodier and more interesting this time around because the nature of the enemy has changed. The original Gizzida invaders could be kicked off Earth because they weren’t part of it. This new threat takes the worst of the old threat and makes it home grown in a way that’s going to make this fight harder and uglier and even more righteous when Hunter Squad wins.

Sooner or later. Probably later. Because there are just oodles of great story-telling possibilities, along with so many chances for steamy romance, just waiting to be told. In the end, it took TWENTY books for Hell Squad to get their job done. I wouldn’t be mad – at all – if Hunter Squad needs every bit as many.

We survived the invasion and beat the aliens. But they left something behind…
Humanity is rebuilding after a devastating invasion. But the growing towns all have walls to protect them from the monsters. Created in alien labs, the monsters hide in the swamps, rivers, and forests—breeding, mutating. Every now and then, they crawl out of the shadows.
That’s where I come in. I’m Jameson Steele, the leader of Hunter Squad—the toughest group of soldiers in New Sydney. It’s our job to keep people safe and secure.
We’re the monster hunters.
When I get a panicked call from my childhood friend, Greer Baird, my usual cool goes out the window.
Greer’s an engineer working on a huge dam project that’s vital to our water supply. There’s a giant, deadly monster in the lake, it’s killed some of her people, and she’s in danger.
I’ve wanted Greer for a long time, but she’s too good for me: too smart, too driven, and out of my league.
But there is nothing I won’t do to protect her.
No monster I won’t hunt down to keep her safe.

My Review:

It’s been TEN YEARS since we first met Hell Squad, but it’s been THIRTY for them. Time flies when you’re having fun – and when you’re kicking slimy alien ass off our planet!

We first met the Hell Squad at the beginning of their series, just after the rampaging alien Gizzida had invaded Earth and were doing their damndest to strip this world of all of its resources.

Over the course of the 20-book series, the members of the Hell Squad and the survivors that gathered around a hidden military base in Australia’s Blue Mountains fought back against the Gizzida and finally managed to throw them back into space – with the help of hidden survivors at other bases around the world.

But the Gizzida didn’t go down easy – and they left plenty of trouble behind them. Including Gizzida/Terran hybrids that weren’t eliminated by the superweapon that eliminated the ‘pure’ Gizzida from the planet.

The Hunter Squad series opens thirty years after the end of the final book – and battle! – in the Hell Squad series. And that’s plenty of time for the children of those earlier heroes to be born, grow into adulthood, and take up the fight that their parents are still fighting – because the job’s not done until the last Gizzida hybrid burns. Or explodes. Or whatever works.

The books in the previous series were all about the combo of adrenaline chills and hot thrills of picking away at the Gizzida while one pair of heroes in each story finds the Happy For Now that they hoped could turn into a Happy Ever After – and they did. Based on this first entry in the new series, it looks like the Hunter Squad is planning to follow the same pulse-pounding pattern.

Hunter Squad leader Jameson Steele, the son of Marcus and Elle Steele, the protagonists of that very first book in the first series, has been in love with Greer Baird, the daughter of Shaw and Claudia Baird, the happy couple in book 7, quite possibly forever. Or at least the minute he noticed that Greer wasn’t just one of the guys – even if she absolutely can kick ass like one.

But Greer, like Jameson’s mother before her, is one of the brains in this band of survivors, and Jameson is definitely part of the brawn. The leader of it, in fact. But still, her leadership of one of the science/engineering teams that is helping put their civilization back together gives Jameson a really terrible case of the “I’m not worthy’s” – pretty much exactly like his dad felt around his mother.

So he’s been manfully pining from a respectable distance. He doesn’t want to mess up their deep friendship, and he honestly doesn’t want to hear her badass parents – after all, they helped save the whole entire planet – confirm what he’s always believed. That he’s not worthy of their daughter – even if he is. Of course he is, and not just because his parents are ALSO badasses who helped save the planet.

But when the latest generation of Terran-adapted Gizzida hybrid monstrosities come for Greer and her team on a remote project, it’s up to Jameson and the Hunter Squad to save the day, and the future, so he and Greer finally have a chance at their own HEA.

It’s the next-generation for both the Hell Squad AND the monsters they fought, and the rematch is already fantastic!

Escape Rating A-: Very much like that other “Next Generation”, this first book in the Hunter Squad series needs a bit of set up. For those of us who remember the Hell Squad series fondly but read it back when it came out, that setup serves as both a needed and absolutely desired bit of business, because we all loved those people, wanted them to get their collective HEAs and put Earth back on track. It’s fantastic to see how well they’ve done with the chances they created – and not at all surprising that there are still plenty of fields and aliens left to conquer.

For readers who are starting here – and one could (at least until the temptation to start at the beginning got to be too much) – that same setup gets a new reader stuck into this brave new world, hands over an informative scorecard to help a newbie figure out who they players are this time around, and generally introduces everyone, new and old, to the situation the survivors are in thirty years after they celebrated their Independence Day on the Gizzida.

And in the middle of that fantastic (re-)introduction, there’s a sexy friends-into-lovers romance between the two characters who are clearly going to be leading this new round of fighting, along with a forward-thinking technical project that is capable of moving the survivors’ return to civilization a great leap forward. If they can protect it from the undersea monster determined to suck it – and them – back into the depths.

If you’re wondering what the Gizzida were like, and speaking in a roundabout way about that other ‘Original Series’ and ‘Next Generation’, the Gizzida are what you’d get if the Gorn got assimilated by the Borg. Both the Gorn and the Borg were intelligent, space-faring species, so the resultant alien species is too. All the rapacious planet-stripping for resources of the Borg, with a bit more of the individuality – and the reptilian nature and appearance – of the Gorn.

However, the Gizzida/Terran hybrids the Gizzida created to adapt to life on Earth used a lot of Terran fauna in their hybridization, so they’re not as intelligent as their progenitors. Or at least they aren’t YET. As far as the surviving humans know. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that they are NOW, or are headed that way. We’ll see sooner or later, and I’d expect sooner.

Perhaps we’ll get a hint of that in the next book in the Hunter Squad series, North, coming early in April to an ereader or bookstore near you. Or at least one near me, because I can’t wait!