The Woman Left Behind has chemistry, but the payoff doesn’t explode

Laura Howard’s The Woman Left Behind has plenty of chemistry between the two leads and gets them together in a believable way, but the payoff lacks.

The Woman Left Behind sounds more like a thriller or a mystery than anything else. The cover of the final press copy, sent to me by William Morrow, definitely reinforces that impression. However, it’s actually a romance novel (and a bit of a thriller, too, to be fair). Although Linda Howard’s latest has plenty of sizzle, the ultimate climax really doesn’t pay off.

Our heroine, Jina Modell, definitely owns the book. She has a strong personality all on her own, and her narration makes us want to root for her to succeed more than for her to actually get together with the hero, Levi Butcher. Whether that’s a success or failure depends on what you’re here for: the romance or the action. Personally, it falls more in the “meh” range for this reader.

Admittedly, there’s a lack of relationships outside her family and her newfound GO-Team (which is comprised entirely of men), but the book at least tries to explain it — she’s too busy in physical training for the bulk of the novel. That training does drag on a bit too long, however; the actual missions (which are a bit Mission: Impossible-esque with fewer Tom Cruise stunts and more drones) don’t start until almost halfway through the book exactly.

Speaking of that, though, there’s a strange lack of time spent with Levi. He gets parts in the book — and when he does get the chance to narrate, it’s usually at big moments — but it’s hard to root for him in the same way we root for Jina because of that. We know he’s apparently extremely nice-looking and that he’s a bit stern because he’s trying not to show how much he’s into Jina, but not much more than that, really.

Howard seems like she almost writes herself into a corner by putting them on the same GO-Team and then immediately having Levi ban himself (or any of the other guys) from dating Jina. The plot’s way out of that feels like the most natural response, given everything else, so that’s a mark in Howard’s favor.

Speaking of the ultimate, practically inevitable get-together, though, it just doesn’t work. Perhaps it’s that the book builds it up so much (and has an, ahem, memorable scene in an airfield during parachute training as a prelude), but the actual physical culmination, so to speak, is not particularly exciting or thrilling in any way.

So what of the thriller side of things? There’s an overarching plot involving someone trying to get revenge on the GO-Teams and their leader. It’s there, and Howard includes some interludes, but coming into the series in this second novel, it’s not much more than there. That’s almost certainly a failure, to go back to that metric.

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Pick up The Woman Left Behind if you liked Troublemaker, the previous novel in the series, or are a fan of Howard.

Otherwise, you might find that it’s just there in general, with some good chemistry and not-so-good payoff.