Strike and Burn by Taylor Hutton

Posted January 28, 2025 in review Tags: 2.5 stars, billionaire, Damsel in Distress

Strike and Burn by Taylor Hutton
Pages: 358

Genres: Romantic Suspense
Source: ARC, NetGalley

Goodreads

A breathless romantic thriller that doesn't just toe the line between danger and desire—it burns it to the ground.

Honor Stone is all alone in this world. No family, no money, no future. So when she locks eyes with Strike Madden—in the morgue of all places—she’s not in the mood to be seduced. Sure, he’s drop-dead gorgeous, and the sizzle of attraction between them is undeniable, but she’s reeling from her identical twin sister’s murder. It’s the wrong time, wrong place, wrong everything.

Still, the enigmatic billionaire hires Honor as an artist to spearhead his carefully curated erotic animation studio—a job they soon find to be a dangerous mix of business and pleasure.

But when her twin’s obsessive killer targets Honor, the painful secrets of Honor’s traumatic past will finally be exposed with devastating consequences. Strike will stop at nothing to protect her, uncovering his own bone-chilling demons—a beautifully broken, dark side that doesn’t scare Honor…

It consumes her.

Strike and Burn is a romantic suspense story about Honor, who is morning the death of her twin sister, and is about to be hunted by her killer. In quite possibly the most unconventional meet cute, she meets the hero in the morgue over the body of her sister. Color me intrigued.

Strike, our brooding billionaire, swoops in to help Honor. The danger is real for Honor and it has already taken her sister. There is certainly lots of sizzle between Honor and Strike. Like, a LOT. This book is almost what I would consider erotica. See, the suspense plot kind of resolves without much fan fair and the focus becomes the sex between these 2. Again, that isn’t a bad thing if that is the book you are looking for. However, I thought the premise of this story was so good and it just missed the target by a lot. It isn’t a bad book; it just isn’t what I expected from the the first several chapters. This could have been a 5 star read, but the pacing was wonky and the characters were flat. There are also 2 timelines, which can be done excellently, but in this case I think it hurt the overall story pacing even more.