Jace Winslow is an ex-navy SEAL who became a tattoo artist. His bad boy image got him a reality TV show Inked by Jace and for a while he was lost in the limelight of Hollywood, until one day he cleaned up and moved out to a small quiet town, but kept his show and his tattoo parlor. Kat Ryan divorced two years ago after a bitter contest and now just wanted to make the best living possible for her son Jax... which means work as a waitress in the diner... right across the street from Jace's new tattoo parlor. When Jace walked through the diner door, her concentration was shot, and she seriously questioned about what she really wanted in life... and everything else... But does Jace feel the same?The first three volumes in the series are fine, as basically Jace and Kat slowly circled each other, gained each other's trust, while dealing with some other issues. I can even understand the fictional background, even though it does strain my belief. Generally, ex-SEALs do NOT seek publicity, being used to secrecy for so long. Having an ex-SEAL get his own reality TV show is rather... uh, let's just say, fictional.
It is with book 4, when Jace was recalled to service, that I have problems with. The technical and military details were all wrong. Basically, while Jace was "training recruits", he got handed an order to deploy for a special mission. That's not how SEAL reserve teams works. SEAL does have two reserve teams for ex active duty, and they do train, but they don't train recruits. The only way for them to go active is the whole team gets activated for however long the deployment is, and it's six months to a year or however long it should be, not for one mission.
Then instead of spending a couple weeks of intensive training to get back into shape and catch up on paperwork and qualifications, Jace and crew was shoved off to some unnamed carrier out in the middle of nowhere and ordered to wait. There was supposed to be a comm blackout, but his sergeant apparently can break it without permission from the captain (!), by allowing Jace's buddy to call home to check on his wife, and the buddy lent the phone to Jace, who then called up Kat, and they had basically phone sex AND Facetime where Kat did a remote strip-tease. This is so off-the-charts improbable it downright ruined the entire series for me. If the carrier was on comm blackout to maintain secrecy, why is the phone allowed? How are they even getting a connection any way, much less enough bandwidth to do Facetime? This is not the US! There is no LTE connection on a carrier, esp. not under comms blackout!
The military action was tolerable, as was Jace getting his purple heart, merely tolerable. The tactics used just feel wrong. But that could be because I'm a guy.
Book 5 deals with Jace's return to stateside and his injuries changed him, and he and Kat basically had to start over, almost. That I had no problem with.
To put it altogether, Jace and Kat do make a cute couple, but the military details were quite off the mark to be utterly ridiculous. If you take out the military bits, you'd still have a good romance. So the military bits aren't really needed.
Category: Military / Bad Boy
Primary Plot: Tattoo-artist ex-SEAL Jace woos small-town waitress Kat and her young son, is there a future between these two?
NOTE: Major problems with military and technical accuracy
Overall rating: 2/5
