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Book Review of The Sapphire Affair (Jewel, Bk 1)

The Sapphire Affair (Jewel, Bk 1)
orchid7 avatar reviewed on + 271 more book reviews


Ok... I guess I should have read the reviews so that I would at least have been prepared for the HUGE cliffhanger ending. Lauren Blakely literally just stops writing, no wind-up, no signs that the book is drawing to an end, no bye for now ending. The book just has a page that says- If you want to know what happens next, you need to get book 2. I am absolutely NOT a fan of authors doing this. If the book wasn't a part of kindle unlimited, I would drop this story like a hot rock. Grrr!
That said, I'm not quite sure how I feel about the whole story yet. We have Jake, who runs a specialized recovery business, who is billed as kind of a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond. The heroine is Steph, who runs her own dive adventures business. Jake is hired by a friend of Steph's mother (who was also a previous business associate to Steph's former step-father) to investigate the disappearance of $10 million from their company's investment funds. Steph takes a trip to the Caribbean to run a dive tour and also snoop around on her ex step-father at the request of her mother. The two meet up and join forces in the investigation, while struggling through trust issues and attempting to ignore a growing attraction.
I thought the chemistry between the two characters was fairly good. I believed the romantic scenes, and they were fairly appropriate for the age of the characters. BUT... the rest? Not so much. Steph has some fairly significant maturity issues that started to get on my nerves. Jake seemed a bit like he was a college kid one minute, and then a wanna-be secret agent the next. I kept expecting to hear the Mission Impossible theme song to start playing, or for a Spy Kids movie to start featuring Jake and Steph. Their actions were not always consistent with their supposed ages (which I'm still not quite clear about as well.)
Overall, I think that parts of this story were good, parts were kinda silly, and that ending... annoyed the crap out of me!
I might borrow the next one through KU just to see if it gets any better, but hopefully Ms. Blakely doesn't pull this cliffhanger nonsense on her readers again. Give me a full book, or at least a *bye for now* ending. Don't just stop in the middle of a story like this.