Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Benedict Carsington, Viscount Rathbourne and oldest son of the absolutely terrifying Earl of Wingate, is bored senseless at an Egyptian exhibit where he’d acompanied his nephew, Peregrine, who has an absolute passion for all things Egypt, when his eye is caught by a gorgeous woman. Unfortunately, his eye is soon compelled to move off her and on to a fracas--one involving Peregrine, no less, and girl about his age.

The girl turns out to be the gorgeous woman’s daughter; his interest is intensified and his hopes dashed when he finds out that she’s the scandalous Bathsheba Wingate, a member of the notorious Deadful DeLuceys. Years ago, as the story went, she managed to seduce Jack Wingate, younger son of the Earl of Fosbury, into marrying her, an act that caused Lord Fosbury to disown Jack; as a consequence, she is persona non grata with the ton.

Benedict doesn’t associate with social pariahs. Benedict never does anything wrong, because he is Lord Perfect. Benedict, however, is about to get his ass kicked by Lurve.

Bathsheba Wingate hates being a Dreadful DeLucey. She hated her rattletrap upbringing and the way her parents never met a dodgy scheme they didn’t like, and she wants nothing more than to escape the stigma of her family’s past and forge a respectable future for Olivia. To that end, she paints and teaches art lessons for a living, but she’s barely scraping by as it is.

Enter Peregrine and his uncle. Peregrine is in dire need of drawing lessons. Bathsheba is in dire need of money. And Benedict, though he won’t acknowledge it to himself, is in dire need of some excitement. An arrangement is struck up, with all parties taking some pains to disguise the fact that a Carsington is associating with a Dreadful DeLucey, and things go swimmingly for a while--until disaster strikes in the form of Peregrine’s parents, who decide he’ll be much better off in a boarding school in Scotland.

This throws Bathsheba and Olivia into a bit of a tailspin. The exorbitant rates Benedict was paying were a significant factor in the two of them making some progress in their hardscrabble life. While Bathsheba ponders more conventional routes of action, Olivia comes up with a Scheme, and when Olivia has a Scheme, mayhem is sure to follow.

In short, she plans to journey halfway across England to the DeLuceys’ ancestral estate and look for buried treasure. When Peregrine finds out, he intercepts her with the idea of slowing her down long enough for either her mother or his uncle to catch up--except, by hilarious increments, he finds himself becoming more of an accomplice than a saboteur. And once Bathsheba and Benedict figure out what the two children are up to, they have no choice but to chase after the two children--alone, since alerting the authorities would necessitate revealing the fact that the Earl of Wingate’s heir is associating closely with a Dreadful DeLucey.

And you know what happens once you throw two hot people on the road alone in a romance novel. Aw yeah.

There is much to like about this book, and I have only a few nits to pick, which I’ll get out of the way so I can explain what Chase got right, because as is her habit, she hit most of it dead-on.

First of all, what’s up with the weird chunklets of telling instead of showing? The story will be flowing along seamlessly, showing me the action, making me chuckle, drawing me in and investing me in the characters’ conflicts, when BAM, there will be a couple of sentences like “And so he told her XYZ, and yea, she was amazed” or “And thus they spoke all night long and gazed soulfully into each others’ eyes” and the like. These sorts of shortcuts are necessary to one extent or another when writing a book--you can’t bleeding well show every damn thing that happens--but these transitions were especially jarring in this book and they yanked me out of the story every time they popped up.

And then there’s the fact that the main characters, while likeable enough, didn’t have the usual...I don’t know, spark of vigor that most of Chase’s characters provide. See, one of the many things I enjoy about Chase is her constant ability to subvert my expectations when it comes to her characters. Rupert Carsington of Mr. Impossible, for example, is presented something of a cheerful, insolent dolt; someone who’s not all that sharp, a man much more happy defenestrating villains than debating philosophy. We’re told this repeatedly: by the narrator, by Rupert, by his family, by the people he meets. But what we’re shown, and what the heroine eventually realizes, is that Rupert isn’t stupid, not even close--he just likes to play that way. Similarly, Sebastian Dain of Lord of Scoundrels is a high-strung, vulnerable mess underneath his blustering alpha façade, and Varian St. George of The Lion’s Daughter really IS a horrible wastrel, and not a faux-wastrel who actually has pots of money squirreled away somewhere. Chase does this over and over and over, and not just with her heroes--she does it with her heroines and with her villains.

And she does it to a small extent in this book. Benedict, for example, was a bit of a hellraiser when he was a child, before the weight of being the heir of a distinguished earldom fully descended upon him. But we don’t get to see this subversion the way we do in the other books. Benedict and Bathsheba are perfectly likeable, and I was very happy and satisfied with the way things turned out for them, but out of all of Chase’s characters so far, I’d say that these two have been so far the most conventional. They were sometimes, well...just a bit boring.

The kids, on the other hand...oh my. I’m not kidding when I say that I wish Lord Perfect had been a YA novel that tracked Peregrine and Olivia’s adventures. They were pitch perfect. Peregrine is a somewhat difficult child, and his parents and teachers don’t know what to do with him. He’s eminently logical and he refuses to take anything on faith--including the words of those with authority over him. This is not really a recipe for success in Ye Olde English Public Schools. Underneath the brilliant, stubborn, analytical boy, however, is a child who longs for parents who can provide him with a stable foundation.

Olivia is similarly wonderful. Fast-talking, quick-thinking and devious, she has more than little bit of Dreadful DeLucey in her, and the letters she writes Peregrine are brilliant--they are, in fact, the best letters I’ve read in a romance novel. Everything, from the description of Olivia’s handwriting, her melodramatic turn of phrases, the Capitalization of Important Words, the underlining of Facts That Should Not Be Missed, is bang-on. But once you get past the minx, Olivia is a big-hearted girl who wants nothing more than to see her mother happy.

The plot itself is excellent. There are a few twists and turns, all of them quite logical, and Chase doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of making a somebody break out of character just to move things along. She also doesn’t take the easy way out for some of the resolutions--the way the treasure hunt was resolved, for example, is quite ingenious.

And as always, Chase’s narratorial voice is quite wonderful. It’s very distinct, wry and witty, and I’m a big fan of it. If nothing else, Chase captures the rhythms of nineteenth-century English--or at least, what I imagine nineteenth-century English to sound like--better than any American author I know. Authors of historicals who think they can make their characters sound convincing by tossing around a couple of ‘tis-es and ‘twas-es and showing off some random slang like “micefeet” or “mushroom” would do well to study how Chase does it.

If you see this book in the store, what are you waiting for? Grab it. It’s worth full price, even if it’s not Chase’s best--but then Chase, even when she’s not at her best, is still a formidable force.

Kate Wexford is “assistant head of ER” at a respected hospital, a woman who describes her work as a physician as “not just a job; it’s who I am.” She finds herself embarrassingly enraptured by a portrait of an 18th century Scottish Highland Clan leader, a man she fantasizes about as if he was real and who unexpectedly becomes real when Kate gets a helpful hand into the museum portrait and into the world of the 1744 Scottish Highlands and the bed of Darach MacTavish.  Luckily for the two surprised leads, Darach’s close friend Hamish turns out to be a time traveler himself who lives simultaneously in Kate and Darach’s temporal planes and who informs Darach and Kate that they called out to each other through time (I didn’t even bother trying to parse through all the rules here, because it only got me frustrated when I tried it during The Time Traveler’s Wife).  Their fates are entwined, Hamish informs them, connected through Darach’s impending death at the bloody Battle of Culloden (although the real battle took place in 1746, LaBrecque has it as 1745), which will also put an end to the MacTavish line.  The romance and the story unfold from there, as Kate and Darach travel back to Kate’s home in 2006 Atlanta in pursuit of information and a strategy to alter Darach’s apparent fate.

What worked best for me in Highland Fling was the interaction between Kate and Darach.  Both characters are ostensibly leaders, and Darach especially is portrayed with a nice balance of cocksure confidence and circumspect concern for the welfare of his Clan.  For the most part I felt that Darach escaped the irritating quasi-alpha fate of having his protectiveness morph into patronizing domination.  It was easy for me to see how his growing passion for Kate was intertwined with his sense of responsibility to his people and not an abandonment of something that supposedly defined him. Kate was a little more difficult for me, because for all her assertions that medicine is her life and her identity, she became quickly and wholly consumed by Darach’s plight and her growing feelings for him.  Several critical decisions Kate made late in the book were particularly troublesome for me, because they seemed to undermine a key element of her character and were made with absolutely no articulated contemplation of their real implications and likely impact on her identity and fate. I love strong and independent women in Romance, but professionally passionate women aren’t necessarily personally wanting and emotionally deprived (it’s often quite the opposite, in fact, at least in real life), and I wish we could move away from this stereotype in contemporary Romance.  While I think I understand what LaBrecque was trying to do with this “healer of men and their souls,” Kate felt relatively shallow to me.  So while I understood how two people from very different temporal moments could find a deep recognition and understanding of each other, my experience of Kate and Darach’s relationship was not very emotionally intense for me.  While I enjoyed their story, I didn’t find enough dimension in the protagonists to really bring their drama to life in my mind or heart. 

The greatest pleasure of Highland Fling for me was the banter between Darach and Kate, as she teases him for his Highland bravado and he teases her for her liberated sass, generating relationship stereotypes and skewering them at the same time:

Darach:  “I love you you daft, crazy, lusty wench.”
Kate:  “I traveled over two-hundred years to find you.  You’re everything I never wanted in a man – arrogant, bossy, too sexy for your own good, and gone in less than a week.”

There was a clever scene involving a condom that LaBrecque used to very good effect, an interesting and amusing common-sense solution to sexually involving two characters early without the promise of everlasting love, and while some of the pseudo-Scottish speak felt over the top and inauthentic (worst line in the book:  “Ah, Katie-love, you have a bonnie set of tits”), it wasn’t so overdone as to be intrusively obnoxious.  There were a few unbelievable moments, most of which related to the ease with which Darach adapted to 21st century life and technology, and frankly I felt that two people with Darach’s and Kate’s intelligence could have arrived much more quickly at the solution to Darach’s dilemma, but the writing and the relationship held a certain good-natured cheekiness that made my reading experience more pleasant than I expected based on the premise of the book.  I haven’t read Outlander and have no idea how that would have influenced my response to this book, but even I recognized some significant superficial similarities that made me hope Highland Fling was written in homage and not duplication.  All in all, I found Highland Fling amiable if not memorably substantial.

Before I wrote this review I visited Harlequin’s writing guidelines for Blaze and was struck by the following:  “The series features sensuous, highly romantic, innovative stories that are sexy in premise and execution . . . and [w]riters can push the boundaries in terms of characterization, plot, and explicitness.” I thought a lot about those two concepts – innovation and boundary pushing – trying to decide whether I should measure them differently for series fiction than I would for single title books. Fair or not, I realized that my expectations for series fiction are somewhat different.  For example, while I noted quite a few clichés in the writing of Highland Fling (i.e. he “kissed her with a need bordering on pain,” “the fire of want . . . licked at them with flames of desire”), I didn’t count them against the book so much, and while I found numerous copyediting errors (i.e. the confusion of lie/lay, borne/born, misplaced modifying clauses, misspellings, and subject-verb disagreements), I was annoyed but not fatally so.  There were things that niggled at me, like the mistaken date of the central historical event in the story, which then made it difficult for me to settle into the historical aspect of the story.  I found myself more actively questioning things along the way, like the image I had of Darach wearing only his great kilt with no long shirt or short coat, as well as some of the language choices (i.e. Darach’s liberal use of “bluidy”/bloody, which I thought was a pretty profane oath in the 18th century, especially to a Jacobite).  None of these things ruined my enjoyment of the story, but they did get me thinking about how the finer details of craftsmanship play a part in distinguishing a merely pleasant book from a memorably compelling one.  Highland Fling was a pleasant C+ read.

At the invitation of one of her clients, Milagro attends a book party for a former classmate and flame, Sebatian Beckett Witherspoon, who broke her heart and went on to pretentious literary success. She hated his book, but goes to the party anyway, and finds that he’s beyond furious to see her there, even though he was the one who dumped her for another girl who was more his social equal. Seems you can put the Latina in the Ivy League, but that doesn’t mean the other students won’t recognize the divide in culture and class. Milagro, because she has a backbone of steel from having grown up with a monstrous mother, seems to be aware of but largely immune to such snubs.

While at the party, she flirts with waiters, mingles a bit, and meets Oswaldo Krakatoa, with whom she has an incendiary attraction, and she follows him to his hotel room, where they make out in pre-booty-shaking fashion, which causes them to fall down, and somehow in the twister he ends up biting her. Then some funky crap begins.

Seems Milagro wakes up feeling sick as hell, and hides out at a friend’s house until she can get herself home. Then she’s kidnapped by Beckett Witherspoon, who turns out to be a member of a murderous and completely insane organization called CACA, but then rescued by a friendly waiter from the book party, who turns out to be Oswaldo’s brother.

She’s hidden away at Oswaldo’s family home so her recovery can be watched by the family, and where just about everything can be filed under “Is Not What It Seems.” First, the dude’s name is Oswald, but why he choses to tweak his identity, I couldn’t say. And why is she there? And are they actually vampires or just victims of a strange blood disorder, as they profess that they are? Then, there’s the crusty, cranky, bitchy matriarch of the family, Edna, who takes an instant dislike to Milagro. Does she belong with Oswald’s very wealthy and very elegant family? Should she leave? Should she stay? And is she now a vampire?

Obviously, I’m not giving all the answers, so if you’re looking for Miss Harriet, you know not to look here. A good number of the reviews published so far dwell on the point that this isn’t a romance; that’s fine, it’s not. It doesn’t have the structure of a romance and while there’s some great attraction between Oswald and Milagro, the challenges placed in their way serve to discredit his integrity and could easily make him seem like a disingenuous buttnoid if the reader expects noble, perfect hero.

Milagro, however, is a damn hell fascinating character. She speaks directly to the reader through asides and commentary within each situation, which was jarring at first, but then became one of the quirks of her character, like a Shakespeare character addressing the audience. Not every character does, so those that do are significant. At the beginning of the book, her manner of addressing the story and the reader can make her seem an unreliable narrator, but ultimately I recognized her written style as indicative of the fact that as a Latina trodding in the world of WASPS and the very flaky top of the upper crust, she herself did not feel entirely welcome in any situation she was in. Because she wasn’t sure if she was an observer or a participant, she steps back and forth into and out of the story.

By the end of the book, I found myself questioning whether Milagro did change, and if she grew or developed as an individual. She certainly changes, but then seems, on the surface, to change back. On one hand, she stops pushing herself to act on, and think, and write what she thinks will impress other people, and starts living solely to make herself happy. It’s as if, due to the dreadful childhood she experienced, she feels that all she deserves is to live on the fringes of security, happiness, and wealth, and that her near-bottom-dwelling apartment existence is all to which she should feel entitled. While it’s not said outright, Milagro learns to accept the possibility of her own acceptance.

Oswald, however, is a very curious hero, and his behavior is one reason you cannot read this novel expecting it to be a straight-up romance, neat with a twist. He’s not always honest, though he is charming and very self-assured, and, like Beckett Witherspoon, has a very difficult time avoiding his desire for Milagro. His redemption is questionable and his worthiness of Milagro is equally so, but at the same time, it’s difficult not to root for her happy ending with Oswald.

My problems with the story came from not being able to clearly discern what was real. Was the disease real, or was vampirism real? Was the villain real, or was it a puppet show with good looking, empty-headed people it’s front, believing that there was more support behind them than there actually was? What actually happened to Milagro’s health by the end of the book? The reason I want to call this story a fable, or perhaps an allegory, is that there seems to be a moral, or a metaphorical representation pointing to a larger subtext, but even with some serious time pondering the story, I can’t gain access to what it might be.

Further, while Acosta’s writing itself is crisp, funny, clever, and very, very sticky, in that you can’t very easily put the damn book down once you’ve started it, the story veers off the road a few times, leading me to question whether secondary characters are more important or less so than I thought, and adding to the sense of disorientation with the final and potentially greater implications of the ending. Something could be going on here, I’m not sure I get it, and I hate not getting it. Makes me feel stoopud.

Aside from the possibilities of subtext, and the questions surrounding the resolution to the story, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula is a marvelously fun book to read, and is published at just the right time. Expect to see it in a beachbag near you.

Lucy Armstrong, a successful director especially known for her work with dog food commercials, is called down to the Savannah River swamps to finish the last four days of filming an action flick after the original director keels over from a heart attack. Lucy is perfectly happy to direct dogs; dogs are better-behaved and a hell of a lot more predictable than actors. But her sister Daisy, the script supervisor, wants her working on this film, and what’s more, Daisy’s five-year-old daughter, Pepper, really, really wants to see her. And really, nobody says no to the cute kid, especially in a romance novel.

The sinking feeling in Lucy’s gut intensifies when she finds out that her ex-husband, Connor, is also the stunt coordinator for the film. The sinking hits rock bottom once she actually takes stock of what a monumental mess the whole project is. Daisy is almost literally sleepwalking, Pepper is anxious and starving for attention, Connor is acting like even more of a shifty asshole than usual, key personnel have quit, most of the crew doesn’t seem to know or care about what’s going on, the few who do care are actively hostile, and people are strangely reluctant to hand her a complete copy of the script.

And when her lead actor hires his own body double and stunt advisor, a taciturn but OMGHOT Green Beret named JT Wilder, all hell breaks loose--or, at least, key pieces of equipment do, and when you’re on a movie set, that’s close enough.

JT Wilder is on leave when he decides to pick up some easy money by being a nimrod actor’s stunt double. Shit, he’s jumped out of plenty of helicopters into REAL enemy fire; this should be a cakewalk. What he didn’t count on was being dragged into a CIA operation involving international terrorism, money laundering and ancient jade penises. Complicating things even further is the movie director, who looks far too much like Wonder Woman for his peace of mind. And there’s that one-eyed alligator hovering around the swamps surrounding the set....

The whole story takes place over four days. There’s not a timeline so much as a time squiggle that’s then squished into something vaguely dot-like. A LOT happens, and very fast. An inhumanly fast pace isn’t normally a problem with an action book, because hurry-up-and-wait, while no doubt more realistic, makes for a boring read. It’s all very entertaining, but I feel like plot and character development were shoved to the wayside as a consequence.

And for a romance novel, that warp speed isn’t so good. For myself, I really, really enjoy watching the love develop and the tension build. Four days from “Hello, you’re kind of hawt,” to “Happily Ever After”? That’s not romance, folks. That’s creepy. That’s JT-having-to-issue-a-restraining-order-because-Lucy-won’t-stop-stalking-him wacky. The love story is even more strained when you consider that JT and Lucy get almost no time alone at all because they’re both working on a movie set, and the romance doesn’t even start looking like one until about halfway through the book. Yes, JT’s a motherfucking hero, and Lucy gets to watch him do all sorts of hot, hero-ey sorts of things like save the day and shit, but they don’t really get to sit down and interact meaningfully--interaction that doesn’t involve their squidgy bits, at any rate.

This is strange, because reading the book, you get the feeling that both JT and Lucy are, well, sane people who think things through, more or less, before acting. They’re both assertive, organized and logical, which makes some of Lucy’s romantic decisions by the end of the book somewhat puzzling.

What disappoints me even more is that previous Crusie novels have featured protagonists who fall in love incredibly fast, and I bought into those scenarios with little problem. Both Manhunting and Getting Rid of Bradley, for example, have the hero and heroine falling in love rather quickly (though not four days fast); however, in those books, the hero and heroine spend significant amounts of time alone together. So, this sort of thing can be done, but it just wasn’t convincing in Don’t Look Down.

Other conflicts in this book, especially the tensions between Lucy and Daisy, were resolved in what feels like a similarly slap-dash fashion. (Be warned: Here Lie Spoilers, so highlight the area for the Supah-Secret text): One moment, Daisy seems to be nursing a burgeoning barbituarate habit and some very interesting resentment towards Lucy and her heroine complex, and the next, BAM, they’re more-or-less peachy keen. Crusie is usually stellar at handling tensions like these, and to see this go nowhere made me a bit of a sad panda.

The other parts of the book worked quite well. The secondary characters are memorable and worth noting. Pepper, in particular, is adorable and believable, and I’m speaking as somebody who has a pretty low gag threshold when it comes to the portrayal of cute children in fiction.

The action/suspense portion of the book is a blast, and somewhat more convincing than the love story. I know nothing about the military, guns, tracking enemies or killing people, but I have a sneaking suspicion Bob Mayer does, and it shows.

Overall, the book is a rather insubstantial bit of fun, which is a shame because Crusie always managed to sneak a lot of interesting subtext into her books, even the ones I didn’t particularly care for. This time around, there wasn’t sub-text so much as hurriedly resolved emotional issues. It’s still worth reading, and I enjoyed it, but it lacks that punch that makes it a true keeper.

Getting Rid of Bradley details the creation of a love story out of the unravelling of a marriage, along with some embezzlement, larceny, and attempted murder, and some crazy-ass and adorable animals.

Lucy Savage Porter has just been stood up by her ex-husband, Bradley, who asked her to meet him at the courthouse so he could explain everything. Lucy’s well-meaning but overbearing sister is in her usual position of taking care of Lucy, who is beginning to realize she’d prefer not to be so taken-care-of all the freaking time. Perhaps it would be good for her to fall down and bruise her ass every once in awhile instead of having her sister tell her what she needs to do.

Seeing a heroine decide to break out of her routine because she’s tired of it is one of my favorite methods of character development, because it means she has to evaluate where she is presently and why it sucks booty, make changes, and charm the reader into accepting her as she is, and as she will be by the end of the story. In the hands of a skilled writer, this method works brilliantly on me. I’m a sucker for a heroine’s self-reinvention.

After being stood up in divorce court, the newly-divorced Lucy persuades her sister to take her to lunch in a dingy restaurant, again because Bradley said he’d speak to her there.

Coincidentally, due to being tipped off by anonymous caller, Detective Zach Warren and his partner Julian are also in the restaurant, waiting for Bradley. Is it the same Bradley, or a “more different” Bradley?

Zach operates mainly on instincts, and he’s sure that something is up with Lucy, and that she has information he needs. So he follows her out of the restaurant, only to end up saving her when someone takes a shot at them. But she doesn’t take kindly to being tackled, and assaults him with a mammoth physics textbook to free herself, and runs home. 

He is convinced that she’s key to his investigation of the embezzling Bradley, despite her assurances that there is no way her ex-husband Bradley is the droid they are looking for. Zach decides she needs round-the-clock protection, an idea she mocks until her car blows up right in front of her.

Here’s where I began to quirk a brow: in order to keep an eye on Lucy, and wait for Bradley to show up, he decides to move in, thus forcing them into close and constant contact. I’ve seen worse methods of shoving the hero and heroine into close quarters, but it was a bit contrived.

But once Zach and Lucy are in her house, and once he persuades her that (a) her life is in danger, and (b) she should use her mammoth amount of sick days to take time off of work and hide out in the house with him, the attraction builds, forcing Lucy to consider who she wants to be and whether she wants that version of herself to be with Zach, and forcing Zach to consider that perhaps his days of ardent bachelorhood are over - just as soon as they figure out which Bradley is the one they want, and why Lucy’s Bradly and Zach’s Bradley seem to be the same dude.

As with most of Crusie’s stories, the book is charming because of the characters, both human and canine. Lucy, seeking to reinvent herself, starts with superficial goofy changes, and ends up with hair dyed a dead, depthless black. But as she learns to stand up for herself, she stops bending at the direction of other people’s preferences for her, and learns to choose her own mistakes, even if they mean that she ends up with green hair. And once she understands that the changes she’s hoping for are internal, she’s able to pick a hair color that matches the person she thinks she can be.

Lucy is a great heroine: she’s not thin or physically perfect, and is prone to doing dumb things to her appearance when what she really wants is to change her life - I’ve done that. Watching her change and watching the hero fall for all sides of her - where she starts and where she ends up - quite delicious.

Zach is nicely yummy as well, though not as attractive a character as Lucy. He’s definitely worthy of her, given that he’s gone to great lengths to protect her, even as he becomes aware of some rather large and scary feelings for her. Instead of running away and distancing himself from those big scary emotions, as some romance heroes might do, Zach moves in and sits on the sofa owned by the subject of those big scary emotions, and faces his fears while protecting her from a Bradley or two.

But Zach also illustrates what aspects of this book didn’t work for me. After only a few days of being locked in together, Zach is done - that’s it, he’s getting married. Literally, days after he’s met Lucy. I know some dudes prefer not to dwell on decisions, but that was a little quick on the surrender of his bachelorhood. Even Lucy, who has decided to be more spontaneous and to go after what she wants, is taken aback, considering she just got divorced a few days prior.

Without giving away too much, the mystery of which Bradley is which, and who is after whom, came together slowly, but was prolonged by Lucy and Zach ignoring details and clues that two detail-attentive people should have caught. It’s like watching someone do something really doltish in a movie - I wanted to scream at the book, “No, NO Don’t IGNORE THAT it’s IMPORTANT.” And I couldn’t believe that Zach would breeze by two very large clues that indicated the safety of Lucy’s house had been compromised. The inattention didn’t seem in-character and made the mystery less sold, more flimsy.

But the aspects of what didn’t work were far outweighed by what did, particularly how Crusie handled the bad guy. Bradley is a clever creation in that he is not an all-out villain, just a bit creepy. He’s like a watered down version of that uber-creep Bill in Crazy for You. By the end of the story, you understand his motivations, though you might question as I did why Lucy put up with some of his behaviors. But he is certainly not evil personified, and even Zach realized that he and bad-guy Bradley have things in common. Much like we discussed on SBTB earlier, understanding the motivations and humanity of the villain, particularly when they are written as a person who has made some evil decisions rather than just being evil through and through, makes for a scary and effective antagonist.

Reading early Crusie so soon after reading the babydaddy book did indeed restore my happy quest for good romance, but it also shuffled my To-be-read pile, as I now want to read Don’t Look Down sooner rather than later to see how current Crusie compares to the early publications. But as usual, if one is looking for quality, particularly after deliberately delving into some sticky romance territory, Crusie is as dependable as ever.