Houseboat on the Nile - Tinnean 3.5 stars. 4 for the story, 2 for the structure.

This book has been on my TBR for quite some time and I love a good story with a Fed/spy story line, but this one was a struggle for me.

I really liked all the characters in the book. Quinn and Mark are a fantastic "non-couple". Both men at the top of their game in rival government agencies trying to fight their obsessive attraction to each other. The secondary characters were also quite interesting.

Where the book lost me, and apparently other readers, was in the repetitive writing. While I generally am a fan of alternating POV structure that gives me important insight to the motives of the two main characters, I found that it was just too much here. Rather than just giving important differences, I felt that whole scenes were often needlessly repeated without offering me insight to the differences between Quinn and Mark and it also really disrupted the timeline of the story. There were times where several chapters in Mark's perspective went by, then all of a sudden when Quinn's perspective began, it was a jump back to the beginning of those five or so chapters ( I wish I could explain it better but I hope you get the point). I felt like the book was dragging, but very little was actually happening.

The story as it ends is really unfinished and I am torn in wanting to continue the series since I genuinely enjoy the characters, but not wanting to read more of the story in the structure the author employed. The last section of the book actually moved along very well, with all the action of the story unfolding. Unfortunately, in the short preview at the end of the book, I know that book 2 starts with a jump back for Quinn's POV of what we got from Mark in the last section of the book. I would love an edited down version that stripped the unnecessary repetition down.