What Doesn't Kill Her

What Doesn't Kill Her (Cape Charade Book 2)- Christina Dodd
HQN Books
Release Date: January 29, 2019

Rating:
📚📚📚📚

Warning: Possible Spoilers Ahead!

Synopsis: Kellen Adams suffers from a yearlong gap in her memory. A bullet to the brain will cause that. But she's discovering the truth, and what she learns changes her life, her confidence, her very self. She finds herself in the wilderness, on the run, unprepared, her enemies unknown--and she is carrying a priceless burden she must protect at all costs. The consequences of failure would break her. And Kellen Adams does not break.

_____________________________________________________________________

When Captain Kellen Adams learned in the end of Dead Girl Running that she had a seven-year-old daughter she didn't know about, she knew that her life was going to change.  In the beginning of What Doesn't Kill Her , Kellen is trying to learn how to have a civilian life with a man she isn't sure still loves her, that man's mother (who really doesn't love her) and a daughter.  It isn't working well and Kellen is feeling lost. So when she gets offered a simple security job to help drive a potentially priceless artifact from the airport to a reclusive authenticator, she jumps on it.  Warning bells go off (and then explosions go off) and Kellen finds herself in the wilderness with an artifact, a stowaway daughter, and a bunch of bad guys trying to kill her.  While most people would call that impossible, to Kellen Adams "impossible" just means "harder to do".

Kellen is a great heroine.  She has overcome the trauma and torture of her past to become a fast-acting, fast-thinking Army veteran on par with J.D. Robb's Eve Dallas.  But, like Eve, while Kellen is confident the Army has trained her for handling life-and-death situations, she has no idea how to handle a seven-year-old daughter and all the complications that come with a new civilian family life. She doesn't instantly fall in love with daughter Rae and while Rae's father Max doesn't understand that, the reader certainly can.  Rae may be a happy and intelligent child, but insta-bonding with a strange kid is not realistic- in fiction or reality.  Having to keep Rae alive through a mountain journey teaches both mother and daughter important lessons, and the ties that develop during the trip make a much better foundation for a relationship than Max had hoped for.  As Kellen and Max begin to think that at least some of the trouble had less to do with a priceless artifact and more to do with someone wanting Kellen dead, the two of them do some much needed bonding of their own.  By the end of the book, I was convinced that the little family had a great start to a long and happy, trouble free life.  Except of course, Kellen never does anything the easy way. Be ready for a bit of a cliffhanger ending that Dodd will have to solve in the next book!

The double plot of people after the artifact and people after Kellen blended well- Dodd is a master of her craft and knows how to keep readers engaged with drama and suspense.  People who have read Dead Girl Running will be happy to see some cameos from those characters and be proud of Kellen as she continues to battle the past and the present.  People new to the series will get good backgrounds and explanations and not feel lost dropping in to the second book in a series.  And all of us will probably secretly (or not so secretly) wish we were bad-ass enough to take Kellen's life motto as our own:

What doesn't kill her . . . had better start running!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review