No Fire Inside

Readers either love or hate author Kristen Ashley's work.  I was on the fence with her motorcycle gang quartet, the last of which was my favorite, Motorcycle Man.  In it there was a strange character named Hop Kincaid who was kind of an enforcer for the Denver gang.  An even more disturbing character was Lanie Heron who got shot defending a boyfriend who had gotten in too deep with the mob and wasn't worth the effort to stand beside.

Bringing them together in Fire Inside was definitely a risky proposition, a risk that didn't really pay off for me.  In fact, the further into the book I got, the more I realized that the story was merely a short story which had been blown up to novel size through repetition and inane plot twists, two ploys not up to Ashley's previous standards of writing.

So I've got to wonder why Ashley felt compelled to write the book.  Did fans want to see Lanie finally get a guy worth defending?  Did fans like Hop so much that he needed his own book?  Considering that she drew Hop in Sam Elliott's Fatal Beauty image, I feel that she does both Hop and Elliott a disservice.