Trauma Alert by Radclyffe

Publisher:                  Bold Strokes Books

Ali Torveau focuses all of her energy on her work as a doctor in a hospital trauma unit.  By keeping busy she doesn't have to remember a tragedy that has haunted her for years.  It also distracts her from the fact that she doesn't have much social life to speak of.  That's why she's not happy when firefighter Beau Cross shows up in a class Ali is teaching EMT certification.  Beau is brash, arrogant and reckless, or so Ali believes.  She's everything Ali tries to avoid, but Ali can't stop thinking about her.  Beau is smitten with Ali the first time she sees her, but has her own demons to deal with.  She appears cool on the outside, but Beau is running from her own painful past.  She needs to save lives and she needs to love Ali.  Ali can't love Beau.  She can't take the chance of suffering another loss in her life.

Trauma Alert is part of a series from Radclyffe that will feature First Responders, professionals who react to a crisis on the ground level.  These books are meant to be romances.  Anyone who expects to learn much about how these people are trained or carry out their jobs will need to look somewhere else.

With a clearly stated purpose, the characters become the focus of the book.  Secondary characters are used to provide background material or to illustrate personality traits of Ali and Beau, but there is no mistaking that this book is mainly about the interactions between them.  Radclyffe knows what to write into her characters so that the story moves along.  Though they may appear complicated to other people, the reader will quickly figure out that they aren't really.  They are simply two women who have been hurt and haven't figured a way to get over that yet.

Radclyffe has a winning formula.  She basically writes the same two characters, giving them different names and putting them in different situations in each book, but following the same progression to the same result.  It's difficult to argue with success and her many fans prove that they like what she writes.  The plot isn't complicated, but the story is well told and there are a number of sex scenes thrown in to spice up the activity.