Review: Rush

by Joan Swan
Rating: 4/5

Jessica Fury, Washington lobbyist, has money, connections, and her own firm. But five years ago she had something better: happiness. Her firefighter husband, Quaid, was handsome, courageous, and crazy about her. Then one day he walked into a chemical inferno--and never walked out. Jessica has been through hell to get back on her feet. And then a rumor surfaces that could bring a miracle or shatter her world--again. Q has been a prisoner forever. He's honed his mind and body into weapons. He's developed abilities no one else understands. But he's still at the mercy of a cabal of ruthless men, who blank his memory, test him like a lab rat, and tell him lies. Although his past has been erased and his future looks grim, instinct tells him he has a woman to live for. What his mind can't remember, his body can't forget. . . The heat is on.

So, Rush is book three in Joan Swan’s Phoenix Rising series, a paranormal romantic suspense series. With smokin’ hot firefighters. Everything is better with firefighters? Five years ago the firefighting squad went into a burning government building and came out changed. Unfortunately some rogue elements of their government decided the best way to cover it up was to get rid of them.

Quaid was one of the first to enter the building and got an extra blast of chemical, so Gil Schaeffer decided he’d be the best person to experiment with in regards to abilities. This is so evil I can’t even… They (the governmental conpiracy types) had to knew what the chemicals might do but they didn’t warn anyone they just watched to see what would happen.
Jessie was Quaid’s wife and took his loss badly. Really badly. She denied her abilities as best she could and ended up a drug addict as she tried desperately to forget her loss. She was devastated by his loss. When Keira and Teague come to her office in Washington to try and convince her Quaid might be still alive she refuses to believe it. Teague tricks her into scrying for Q, and she refuses to believe that he is Quaid even after astral projecting to him. And I was so drawn into her that despite reading Blaze and being 99% sure that Q was actually Quaid I wanted to shout at Teague and Keira to leave her alone because I sympathised so strongly with Jessica and her inability to cope with her loss.
Q, on the other hand is broken. He is a seething mass of instincts and fear with no memory of how he learnt any of his skills. He doesn’t know about his abilities at all so thoroughly have Schaeffer and Gorin fucked him over. My heart broke as he tried to understand who he once was and who he is now. The rage he went into when he realised how much of his life was stolen is amazing. His utter devastation as he realises that he was married to Jessica and he doesn’t even remember.
As far as the series’ plot goes we have a fair amount of resolution and plenty of set up for the next part of the series. I will say this, the ending is so fast. I’m not sure if Quaid remembers his life before the fire or not. I don’t know if Scaeffer and Green are dead or not and the ending is so quick that it’s closer to a HFN than a HEA.
Bottom line, everything you thought that this book might not do it does. Quaid comes back from the dead and you feel the emotions that it causes the relief and worry, the fear and expectations. You see Quaid trying to understand how to live without being an experiment. Jessica’s fear that he’ll disappear, that she’s not strong enough to live if she loses him again, or if she doesn’t is so real. Read Rush.
**I received this book as an ARC from Kensington via NetGalley**
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