Series: Hunter Squad

#BookReview: Hunter Squad: North by Anna Hackett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Hunter Squad: North by Anna HackettNorth (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!

A- #BookReview: Hunter Squad: Jameson by Anna Hackett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Hunter Squad: Jameson by Anna HackettJameson (Hunter Squad) by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, science fiction, science fiction romance
Series: Hunter Squad #1
Pages: 186
Published by Anna Hackett on March 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

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!