The Hostage by Melinda Di Lorenzo is an excellent romance tinted thriller. At just under 300 pages, The Hostage packs enough story and characters to keep the reader interested and turning the pages without ever getting bored.
Joelle Dierdrich is a nurse who badly needs a change in her life. She takes on a last-minute assignment on a flight taking a prisoner for treatment. The details of why and where are rather skipped over to make the story work.
The plane crashes and there are six survivors. Joelle, prisoner Beck Samson, and four law enforcement men. It soon appears that none of the law enforcement officers want Samson or Joelle to survive the crash.
Samson and Joelle escape the crashed plane and rely on Samson’s survivalist skills to stay alive, oriented, and away from the men who want to kill them.
The backstory is Samson is falsely accused of having killed his business partner who was doing business with the very, very powerful LaBelle crime family.
The Hostage focuses on Samson and Joelle surviving in the woods while being chased by four armed law enforcement officials who, as it will turn out, may not necessarily be good guys. The romantic thriller part comes in with the two main characters become deeply atracted to each other.
Melina Di Lorenzo’s romantic thriller works because of its strong characters and quick pacing. The reader does need a dose of willing suspension of disbelief for this thriller to work but it is not that hard to give in to this novel. Di Lorenzo does indulge in a bit of Deus Ex Machina to make things work but she gets away with that too.
The Hostage is a fun, quick-paced read that is sure to entertain.
The Hostage
Melinda Di Lorenzo
Headline Eternal 2022
297 pages
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