Shooter

Shooter by Dahlia West

My rating (out of 5 stars):

2 stars—It was okay.

Description from Goodreads.com:

“Chris “Shooter” Sullivan has returned to his home town of Rapid City, South Dakota to pick up the pieces of his life shattered by a roadside bomb in Iraq. He only wants to focus on holding what’s left of his old unit together, running his garage where he builds custom bikes and cars, and pretending that his murdered father’s motorcycle gang doesn’t exist.

Hayley Turner is a young woman with her own traumatic past. Fresh off the bus from Nowhere, USA, all she wants is a job and a place to live, until it’s time for her to leave again. She doesn’t want to make friends, or enemies, least of all the ex-Army Ranger who obviously doesn’t like her. She bristles under his watchful eye. He’s even got her convinced she’s bad news.

But circumstances force two people who don’t need anyone to need each other more and more. The more Chris gets to know Hayley, the harder it is to stay detached. And the more Hayley gets to know Chris, the more she realizes she’s been alone for so long she might never recover from it.”

My Thoughts:

I have mixed feelings on this book. It could have been really good, but it took a turn for the worse around the 50% mark. I was initially intrigued by the characters, but then West takes the reader off on irrelevant tangents and creates asinine misunderstandings. Another problem is that all the male characters have multiple names. Sometimes they go by their first name, sometimes their last, and sometimes a nickname. I was incredibly confused by the randomness of this. And lastly, Hayley is referred to as old and washed up. And she is 30!

I went from being interested to put off really quickly somewhere in the middle.