Ricochet

Someone must have told Sandra Brown she strayed too far from her Romance roots with last year’s “Chill Factor,” a solid suspense offering. She mixes apprehension and amour in “Ricochet,” returning to her more familiar Romantic Suspense.
Homicide detective Duncan Hatcher has a fit when the judge tosses out his case against criminal mastermind Robert Savich, but the trouble really starts when Hatcher meets the judge’s dazzlingly-beautiful trophy wife Elise. From that moment on, he can’t get her out of his mind, mostly because he’s assigned the case when she shoots an intruder in their posh home.
Hatcher doesn’t believe her self-defense claim and intends to throw the book at her, but unfortunately grabs the police ethics manual, and quickly begins breaking all the rules in the chapter covering association with suspects. Her lingering glance turns into secretly passed notes, telephone messages, and clandestine meetings, all designed to get Hatcher to come to her aid. Her husband – the Judge – is trying to kill her, she says, but Hatcher finds that equally hard to believe.
Brown leaves no doubt that her hunky detective has fallen madly for his suspect, and although a preacher’s son, Hatcher hatches some wild thoughts during the investigation, none of which Brown is shy about passing along.
To some extent, readers have come to expect caricatures in novels much like anticipating the bumbling but lovable sidekick appearing in every Disney movie. Brown offers a medical examiner who concludes a dissection with a snack, the evil-incarnate drug lord, and the private eye who stands a single rung above the criminals on the legal ladder. Her main characters, though – even her smitten detective – have a quality that renders them credible, and her tightly wound plot works well toward a believable conclusion.
It’s hard to expect more of any story.