Hard Beat is Tanner's story, Rylee's brother. Tanner's a reporter who lives off the high he gets upon hearing from his sources the details of a story. He's grieving the loss of his partner, photographer, a loved one but through his memories of their conversations he catches life lessons he never noticed, until now. Tanner gets his reporting high from reporting on military news in the Middle East, where 90% of this novel takes place. Tanner is protective, honest, and pays attention to detail. When he thinks someone's holding out on him, he doubts and second guesses himself and the situation as a whole. Enter BJ, Beaux, a freelance photographer. Things heat up quick, but Tanner's hesitancy is present and there's little give on Beaux's part. The begging and end of the novel were my favorite parts of this novel. We get some of Tanner's backstory in the beginning, what he's going through, and the end we have his fight, his drive shining brightly. The middle of Hard Beat moved at a slower pace for me, feelings and thoughts were repeating themselves, I could guess what was happening next, and refusal to let down walls made things redundant for my liking. At the end, Kim brought the story together and it clicked for me, helped me join back into the excitement and anticipation for Tanner to get his answers.

I was very disappointed in this one. Having read 3 other installments from this series I came into it with a fairly good outlook. That was immediately shot down and never built back up.

Meet Tanner, a war journalist who just lost his best friend and photographer as a casualty of war. Anxious to get back in the field, he's assigned a new photo journalist. Needless to say, Tanner doesn't take the news that his new photographer is a girl and he proceeds to through some epic hissy fits throughout the book over this.

Then there's Beaux or BJ. She's immediately attracted to Tanner for some weird reason but apparently she likes assholes. Beaux is new to the war game and decides that the rules just aren't for her. It doesn't matter that women, esp American women, are targets and she proceeds to just do whatever she wants.

I just couldn't get behind either of them. They were. Ooh childish and immature. It was the whole "I hate you but let's have sex" game and it did not work for me at all. Then Tanner became all crazy stalker obsessive toward the end and it was just out of control crazy and not in a good way. This just seemed so different from the other works that I've read from Bromberg and I'm glad that I didn't read this one first, otherwise I might have stopped.