Do or Die by Suzanne Brockmann

Image linked from Goodreads

When the book opens, Ian  Dunn is in charge of a highly specialized, off the book team hosts are in currently trying to retrieve Nazi art from some typical bad dudes. Ian is in a hotel room and needs to get out and we get to see you little bit about how his team functions.
When chapter 1 begins Ian is now in jail. Two lawyers are trying to get them out one is Phoebe Kruger and the other is Martell Griffin. For a while I couldn't figure out how these were connected to Brickmann's earlier series though Martell tugged at my memory. Finally, he mentions his friend Ric and the light bulb went off, "Forces of Nature," the book that introduces characters who eventually open the Florida branch of Troubleshooters, Inc.
Neither Ian nor the reader knows why they are there. Even Phoebe isn't really sure. She's just filling in for Ian's regular lawyer at a law firm she joined last week (or some other really short period of time.) but Martell wants to offer Ian a deal, a commuted sentence in exchange for help saving two children.
Of course, there's more to the story and more to the reason Ian is in jail but it's a fun ride.
I actually read this book a few weeks ago but totally forgot to review it. I still have good feels about it though. The more I think about it the more layers I remember, this being a typical Brockman where the more you read the more you discover about each of the characters. It's amazing that even within a larger ensemble cast on Brockman is able to bring each character alive and give them each a rich and complex back story.

I wish that Shelly had been a woman. We already know that Brockmann excels at writing a rich and realistic m/m romance so it wasn't really a shock (at least for long-team Brockmann readers) that he was actually "Sheldon". We've seen that in many of her other books. I can tell you it's because I finished "Lean In" really close to when I read this book and I was super-excited that we might see a dynamic with a strong, working mother and stay-at-home dad (Brockmann also excels at strong women who are work/home equals with their guys but I can't think of a story where the woman is the bread-winner and the dad stays home). I haven't seen this much in secondary characters and Brocmann is the author I most associate with taking on romances that other authors tend to ignore.