Chloe Bridges is delayed in Okinawa due to a terrorist attack in Japan.  When inspectors search her luggage they find several vials and sound the alert, detaining Chloe as a potential terrorist.  No matter how hard she tries, the fear as well as the language barrier keep her captors from understanding the vials contain vital stem cells for research she is going to do in Tokyo.

Staff Sgt Zack Niermeyer, USMC, enters Chloe’s interrogation room.  He’s all business and discipline, not prone to the temptations a sulty southern accent can create.  Once Chloe’s identity and purpose for traveling to Japan are cleared up, he decides to be implusive and capitalize on the chemistry the two of them are experiencing with one another.

This might be a satisfying ending, but Ms. Merlin doesn’t stop.  She develops a relationship between Chloe and Zack that is hot, hot, hot.  Zack takes a week of leave and the two of them plan to shuttle back and forth between Japan and Okinawa.  On one such trip, Zack is seriously injured, condemned to a life on a respirator.   Only an experimental stem cell transplate will give him any hope of normalcy.  But as is so often the case of fiction, things don’t quite go the way our hero and heroine plan.

Super Hero was an interesting combination of David Brin’s augmented military in The Postman and a sweet Danielle Steel story reminiscent of The Kiss. The tale briefly touched on the controversy of stem cell research, terrorists, and the decisions revolving around quality of life issues.  These are all powerful subjects to explore and the author did not capitalize enough on the strong emotional pull of any one topic.

The frequent switches of point of view (even to those of secondary characters) were distracting as were the internal comments made by some of the characters, which jarred due to changes in the writing tense. 

That said, at approximately seventy-five pages, Super Hero is a fast, fun read that will have you long for a man who can be the love and protector Zack is for Chloe.