A SEAL Never Quits

by Holly Castillo

Overview

First in a thrilling romantic suspense series featuring a band of do-or-die Navy SEALs in Texas

A SEAL is ready for anything…except losing his heart…

Lieutenant Amador "Stryker" Salas and his tight-knit Navy SEAL team are undercover on a Texas ranch and tasked with covert ops across the border. It's an assignment that requires all their skills, all their secrets, and all their know-how.

Anya Gutierrez, the local veterinarian, has been serving the ranch for years. She loves the animals and ranching life, and Stryker finds her a breath of fresh air in his otherwise rigidly disciplined existence.

When Anya gets caught in the crosshairs of a mission gone sideways, Stryker must tell her the truth about who he really is, risking everything to keep her out of harm's way, even if it destroys him…

Texas Navy SEALs Series:

A SEAL Never Quits (Book 1)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781492680925
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	07/30/2019
Series:	Texas Navy SEALs , #1
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	246,077
Product dimensions:	4.20(w) x 6.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Holly grew up spending many lazy summer days racing her horses bareback in the Texas sun. But whenever Holly wasn’t riding her horses or competing in horse shows, she was found with pen and paper in hand, writing out romantic love stories about Texas heroes.

Today, Holly lives in a small community just south of San Antonio, with her husband and two children. On the family’s 80-acre ranch, surrounded by cattle during the day and hearing the howl of coyotes by night, Holly has endless inspiration for her writing. Holly’s current Romantic Suspense series about heroic Navy SEALs is set in her own backyard of south Texas.

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

Castillo (the Texas Legacy series) kicks off her Texas Navy SEALS series with the instant, fiery passion between a SEAL team commander and a veterinarian who finds herself a target of his most determined enemy. Lt. Amador “Stryker” Salas and his hand-picked SEAL team are assigned to assess rumors of a terrorist cell operating on the U.S.-Mexico border. They purchase a Texas cattle ranch to provide cover for their operation, and Stryker, usually intensely focused on his missions, finds an enticing distraction in local veterinarian Anya Gutierrez. Anya has faced plenty of hardship in her life, including the demands of her job; Stryker is the first man to make her feel thoroughly safe. But even as Stryker and his team infiltrate the Mexican drug cartels, cartel leader Benicio Davila learns about Stryker’s growing love for Anya and kidnaps her in order to lure the SEALs to a final showdown. The immediate attraction, hypermasculine lead, and imperiled heroine feel overly familiar, but Castillo constructs an intriguing corruption case for her SEALs to pursue that will keep readers eager for further revelations in future books. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-05-27
A local veterinarian is caught up in the danger of an undercover Navy SEAL operation in this romantic suspense novel.

Anya Gutierrez is quite familiar with ranching and taking care of cattle. When a group of six mysterious men move onto a ranching property in Hebbronville, Texas, Anya extends her help for the upcoming calving season. Amador "Stryker" Salas knows little about cattle, and, though he's wary of Anya poking around the ranch, he knows he'll have to play up his disguise as a retired bull rider-turned-rancher. The attraction between them is instantaneous despite Stryker's efforts to remain private. When the SEALs' mission takes them into Mexico to disrupt terrorist activity, the danger soon follows them back onto U.S. soil, putting Anya's life in jeopardy. Anya and Stryker fall in love rather quickly; their intimate scenes are broken up by complicated livestock births, assignment debriefings, and a kidnapping. The six Navy SEALs, all living together on one ranch, create a testosterone-laden, hypermasculine fraternity atmosphere. With Stryker's added obsession with Anya's virginity, referring to it as "the greatest gift" and even thanking Anya for "gifting" her body, the book feels archaic. A modern romance this is not. A lot of time is spent introducing the network of cartel characters and the SEALs' web of contacts, leaving Anya's background as a veterinarian who proudly owns her own clinic unexplored. More of a love letter to the military, patriotism, and ranching communities, this fails as a romance and leaves the heroine to simply become the trigger for the hero's protective instincts. Anya lacks agency and disappointingly plays the pawn in good versus bad, where only men pull the strings.

A slew of unnecessary complications further muddies an already bizarre romantic setup.

Kirkus Reviews