I love a good Katie Ruggle romance. In this book Lou is a new member of an ice dive rescue team in a Colorado town. She's building a life for herself for the first time after leaving a controlling ex-boyfriend and equally controlling parents.

Lou has made some good friends who and has just started a steamy romance with Callum, the leader of the ice rescue team. But she also has a stalker who has started to escalate to outright attacks on Lou.

Nice romance/mystery with just enough danger to make some interesting twists. ( )

Louise Sparks does not question her decision to leave her parent's Connecticut home and become a rescue diver in Colorado, even though during her first cold water training exercise, she kicks a headless corpse that floats to the surface. The mystery of who this dead body is and why he is there begins to consume Lou's thoughts. Lou's boss, the handsome Callum Cook, agrees to help her conduct an unofficial investigation into the death of this man with whom Lou feels a connection. However, Lou's stalker has other ideas about the way Lou spends her time and starts to escalate his unwanted attention.

Hold Your Breath is a fairly average romantic suspense with dialogue that seems a bit stiff and unrealistic. We learn some information about the characters as the book progresses, but for the most part, they remain flat and static. Some of the banter does add much needed interest to the story, but it isn't enough to make the characters come to life. The resolution to the stalking mystery is fairly obvious from the beginning, but there is a minor twist at the end that adds a little more to the story. Overall, however, Hold Your Breath is a disappointing romantic suspense with nothing new to offer the genre. ( )

Boring and tame, which is surprising with how much actually happened in the book. The author just could not quite elicit the required tension for this genre of book. ( )

This was a plenty good enough romantic suspense but I kept having deja vu especially with the final underwater struggle. I'm sure I've read that same scenario before, probably in a novel by Linda Howard whom I love because she introduced me to romantic suspense. ( )

2.5 stars ( )