Review: Sideways by Annie Carlisle

Rating: 3/5  PoP: 64%  The Sideways Series Book 1

Olivia Prescott is returning to work as a paramedic four months after a life threatening work situation. She is not looking for anything more than getting through the day. Gabriel Hughes is the CEO of Hughes International, a private security firm runned by his family. He lives and breathes business but paramedic Olivia and her secrets are a distraction. 

This is the first book in a series and ends on a cliffhanger, there is no HEA here. There is a good foundation and the characters are interesting. However, the pacing is a bit slow and conversations between characters can be a bit repetitive. Olivia is obviously not as fine as she would like to believe following the incident that left her unable to work. She really needed some more critical incident stress debriefing. She realizes that eventually but certainly does not approach it in a healthy way. You can tell the author has experience in emergency services as these characters and situations are pretty true to life. However, Gabriel’s character fell a little short of believable for me. He runs a well known international security firm with special training and does not find out more information on his own. I like that he is being respectful of Olivia as a person but as she continues to put her own life at risk, I would have liked to see more from him.

As I said before, there is no HEA or even a HFN. This is a debut book, so I give some leadacy that I might not give to veteran writers. It is well edited grammatically, with a few inconsistencies. There is a good base plot here but it feels a bit drawn out and am not sure it is enough to keep me reading.