Breaking Point (I-Team #5) – Pamela Clare

Denver journalist Natalie Benoit and Deputy U.S. Marshal Zach McBride find themselves captives of a bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartel. Working together, they escape through the desert toward the border, the attraction between them flaring hotter than the Sonoran sun. They fight to stay ahead of the danger that hunts them as forces more powerful than they can imagine conspire to destroy them both..

This was my first Pamela Clare book and I’ll now need to back track in this series to read the other four.  The book had it all…suspense, intrigue, and a romance between two characters who where barely hanging on through some pretty horrible circumstances.

Natalie Benoit is a journalist for a Denver paper who is in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, for a conference, when her tour bus is ambushed by soldiers in the Los Zetas drug cartel.  She’s taken hostage, thrown into the trunk of a car and driven to the cartel’s compound.

Zach MacBride, a former Navy Seal, is a US Marshal working undercover in Mexico investigating the killing of US citizens.  He’s double crossed by an informant and ends ups turned over to the Zetas, who think he’s stolen a shipment of cocaine.

It’s during this mutual captivity that Natalie and Zach meet. Having Natalie in the cell next to him give Zach something to think about after being tortured at the hands of the Zetas.  Natalie, having seen what the Zetas were doing to Zach, is determined to get them out.

What happens over the course of the next couple hundred pages is a roller coaster ride thru Mexico, across the US Border (and Sonora desert) up to Denver.  Will Natalie and Zach make it to US soil before the Zetas get them?  Will they die in the extreme heat of the desert?  

With that happening, we also get to witness Natalie returning to the land of the living with the help of Zach and Zach fighting his feelings for Natalie as ghosts from his past (thanks to the Taliban in Afghanistan) make it impossible for him to believe he’s worth anything.

This edge of your seat ride isn’t always easy to read, but it’s well worth it when you get to the epilogue.