With two brothers on the police force, Leyla Breda is well aware of the rising crime in her small beach town, but she never expected it to show up on her doorstep. When Leyla finds one of her employees murdered in the alley behind her coffee shop, she’s deeply shaken, and as a new law enforcement officer in town begins to circle her place of business, her instincts only sharpen.
Sean Moran is on an undercover The seaside community of Lost Beach may look like a picturesque postcard, but his team suspects it’s a point of intersection for several crime syndicates that the FBI has been investigating for years. Even so, when the brash and beautiful Leyla Breda starts bossing him around, he’s immediately intrigued. He knows her brothers want him to back off, but every time he sees her, he feels more of a spark.
Leyla’s connections in the local community and Sean’s skills allow them to go deeper into the case together than they would be able to go alone. But when a single crime spirals into something much darker, Sean’s carefully planned mission takes a deadly turn.
Title: Deep Tide
Author: Laura Griffin
Genre: Romantic Thriller
Format: digital arc
Publisher: Berkley
Date Published:April 25th, 2023
Rating: 3//5 Owls
I love that more and more books are defying set genres, but honestly romantic thriller is not one I thought I would ever read.
Now Deep Tide is technically part of a series – it’s a set of standalone books that all revolve around the same general area and has interconnected characters, and seems to center around the police force.
Cop romance is definitely not my jam, but Sean is FBI so we’ll give him a slight pass, but idk man.
I wanted to love this book, I’ve been getting more into both romance and thrillers lately so I thought it would be a perfect blending of my new interests, but something just didn’t fully sit with me. I think my expectations were just a bit off on this one, I expected a thriller with a romantic subplot, instead it’s a romance with a cozy thriller subplot.
Now I don’t know if cozy thriller is a thing, but that’s the best way I can come up with to describe it. Yes, there’s a Murder and some police work, but considering Sean was there low key workingon a big FBI op, he seemed to do very little actual work. Shit, Leyla in all her inappropriate snooping did more work than he did. (Truly tho I feel like Sean would be fired in real life for how much he let a civilian get involved in this OP just cuz he had a thing for her)
The actual thriller part of this novel was very anticlimactic and followed a very expected formula. The bad guys were clearly defined, and the ones that were still a mystery only were because they hadn’t been mentioned yet.
Also, macho cop bros, not my thing.
It was a fun, quick read, and I’m not sad I read this book, but it didn’t intrigue me enough to read the other books in the universe, especially if they all follow the same general formula.
(Side note, a few of the reviews I read mentioned how steamy this book is. I know everyone has different levels of what they consider smut/steamy reads, but in my opinion this book was very low on the spice scale. You have to have either multiple steamy scenes or one mind blowing one for me to consider it smut, this one fell a bit below that.)
Who do I think would like this book?
If you’re into low stake thrillers, instalove romances, or “right person, wrong time” romances, this is a book for you.
I do appreciate this book for its genre bending, and I love the idea of a small tourist town becoming a crime hot spot. Overall I enjoyed the book for what it was, but I don’t think I was the target audience this time around.
If you are interested in Deep Tides it comes out next week, on April 25th, 2023!
Now tell me, what do you think of genre bending stories? And instalove vs slow burn, what’s your favorite?
Happy reading!
*thank you NetGalley and Berkeley for the advanced copy of this book, all opinions are my own.
Caffeinated Book Owl 