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

If You Dare features a non-cartoon cover, thankfully, and an art thief, Damien Black, who has just retired to Atlanta, where a scurrilous restaurateur has asked him to take on one more job. Not sure if he wants to trust the client, Damien visits the art museum where the heist is to take place, and meets the new director of the Atlanta Musuem, Angel Lafonte, who is smart, sophisticated, stunning, and the sister of Damien’s rather greasy, pushy potential client.

Angel is immediately knocked flat by Damien, and a puddle from a rainstorm, and he steals her cell phone and leaves her with his in order to ensure that he will see her again. Petty thievery and pickpocketing is a new technique in my experience of “ways the hero meets the heroine” plot devices, and instead of making Angel feel threatened and controlled, it causes her to up the stakes and steal something of his right back. A backbone she has, yes.

But only where the hero is concerned. Her sleazy brother has a tendency to treat her like an object – his object – and it’s more than creepy and gross. He has men following her, forcing her to dodge them in shopping malls, leaving her car at one entrance then hailing a cab from the other side of a crowded store. She tells him repeatedly to have his “goons” stop tailing her, but of course it continues.

He also has significant gambling debts, and has loan sharks after him, hence his pressuring Damien to take on one last job for him, a multi-million dollar heist from Angel’s art museum. Protecting his sister from himself is not something on darling brother’s mind, apparently, but woe be the man who gets near her while his goons are watching.

Meanwhile, a French cop, after Damien on the theory that he is le Phantome, a famous art thief who has eluded capture, has come to Atlanta, and begins following Damien wherever he can, tracking down his childhood friends and guardians, and generally shadowing Damien every step, regardless of what the Atlanta police think of his actions. Sadly, rental cars can’t keep up with Damien’s collection of sports cars, so Damien can lose him on the highway – so long as there’s no traffic.

Wait. I’ve been to Atlanta. How is this thief dude can zoom all over the city without getting stuck in traffic, while the minute I touch down I spend most of my time in Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams? So not fair. I want an art thief chauffer in a Maserati, next time I’m in Atlanta.

The romance in this book is tricky, since the forces working against the couple consist of her brother, and their own unwillingness to be fully forthright with each other, leaving her brother ample room to sabotage their romance by revealing all the things Damien has been hiding from Angel, such as the true nature and origin of his evident fortune.

As an aside: is it not a fantasy complete when one reads a romance with a spectacularly wealthy hero or heroine? I dig contemporaries with seriously wealthy individuals; it’s one thing when the hero is a construction worker or a pharmaceutical salesman. It’s quite another when the hero is a master at his craft and is fabulously successful and well off for his efforts.

My problems with this book are simple: one, there are serious holes in the story, and by the time you realize how the entire puzzle fits together, which I can’t reveal without entire blowing the ending, you feel cheated of the experience of knowing what the technicalities of the art thievery entail. For example, in Mission:Impossible, did you care about the preparatory work, the assignment, or the romance, or did you care about the hero descending from a wire into a room to type on a computer suspended in midair, evading notice from the security system? Is it not much cooler to check out how Charlie’s Angels jump across security beams and trip alarm systems than it is to see them sprawled on Charlie’s couch? Anyone see the movie “Sneakers” with Robert Redford? There’s one scene where his team heats a room up to 98.7 degrees so he can walk very slowly across it, evading both the heat sensors and the motion detectors, to steal something. It’s the best scene, and the ingenuity of the heist is half the fun. So to have an art thief as the hero, and not pay any attention to describing the thiefing that goes on is disappointing, to say the least.

Further, Angel as a character is a bit of an enigma. First, she’s a strong woman who has earned a position as a director of an art museum. She’s knowledgeable about several types and eras of paintings and sculptures, and she’s attractive and savvy, able to go up against a charming, suave and attractive man who swipes her cell phone from her purse and match him charm for charm.

But then she allows her brother to push her into dangerous situations, and never ceases to give him more rope of forgiveness and excuse with which to hang himself. She’s a classic enabler, which makes sense in that he is her family and she feels she should stand by him, but by the time she has realized he has placed her in significant personal danger, she’s forced to rely on others to get her out. Her brother owes significant amounts of money to a uber-villain named Merrick, and Merrick demands Angel as repayment: the opportunity to sleep with her. And her brother doesn’t say no. He begs Angel to go out with him, even knowing that Merrick is dangerous, certainly homicidal, and not above raping her should she say no to giving him what he truly wants.

Even then, she refuses to give her brother the assing he truly deserves. If a sibling offered me up like that, I’d come seriously close to doing them lethal harm. Yet his actions have no satisfying consequences, and as a reader, seeing the villain figure be told his penalty is to have his sister cut him from her life, when she wasn’t all that pleased to have him there in the first place, is disappointing and irritating, especially when you want to root for such an otherwise brave and clever woman.

Dear Heroine:

Here are some things you should not do if you wish me to continue rooting for you:

1. Do not do something so unbearably stupid I grit my teeth, and moreover, don’t do it solely for the sake of pushing the story forward. Don’t find thousands of dollars in your safety deposit box, along with two passports for your husband and daughter, and then put it BACK. Take it OUT. Take it WITH YOU. Don’t find panties under your husband’s car seat and then THROW THEM AWAY. Put them in a bag and send them to your LAWYER.

2. Stop allowing life to happen to you and then complain when it does. If you want to take charge of your life, I understand. It’s a big step. But get off your ass and DO it already. The more you let larger and larger things happen to you, all the while complaining about them, without doing something for yourself in return, the more I want to stop rooting for you, and settle your problems by smacking you over the head repeatedly.

3. Stop making decisions that make no sense. Actually, for this one I blame the author. I don’t always get the authors who talk about their characters telling them what to do, but I do think that there comes a point in a written character’s story where you have to ask yourself, “What would this person do?” The more consistently you choose to have the character do something that makes no sense in light of the character herself, the more I get annoyed.

4. Do not repeatedly shove your head up your ass and then complain about the view and the smell.

Love,

Sarah

Seriously, y’all, I know I’m going to get a bundle of “Oh my GOSH I LOVED this book how could you be so HARSH” comments, but I did not like this book.

In fact, it rapidly reached the “flip through just to find out who did it and move on with your life” stage, which is about the next-to-worst stage you can get with me. The very worst is “toss the book across the room unfinished and forget about it as soon as possible.” That’s a rare stage with me.

Oddly enough, when I picked it back up to finish on the train on Monday, I did read through the ending without flipping through - only to find myself chastised by Crusie as every single one of the momentously stupid things the heroine did were rewarded by the bad guys getting caught, the mean people shutting up, and all because she was a Good and Honest Person.

The Good and Honest Person in question is Maggie Faraday, who just discovered her husband cheated on her, and then, one after another, has unbelievably weird things happen to her, like giant, rubber dominos falling in succession on her head to the point where you just want her to move out of the way. Her very best friend is surly and secretive (but of course she can’t call said best friend on her shit and say, ‘What is major malfunction?’) and her mother is gathering gossip about everyone else, while telling her to keep her own nose clean, and her entire life in the small town she lives in is based on her being a perfect angel person who never does anything wrong.

She was in turns boring and taunting me to hop into the story so I could beat her.

Her one-night-stand secret-hot-sex-fantasy man has come back to town, coincidentally (not) investigating her husband, who is indeed a philandering bastard buttsquatch. From the moment he shows up on her porch looking for Hubster, hilarity ensues.

Only, unlike many a Crusie I enjoyed thoroughly wherein hilarity ensued, I didn’t enjoy this one. It wasn’t just that the heroine did stupid things and made dumb decisions that left her vulnerable over and over, even as she told herself (and therefore the reader) that she was going to be strong and fight against the rumor-mongering fools in her town and do what she wanted from now on. It was the feeling that no one but NO ONE could truly and really be this so almighty clueless. I can’t even get into the specifics without spoiling the entire plot, as it is a convoluted thing I didn’t entirely capture. But damn. I didn’t cheer for her. I didn’t want her to win. I wanted her to get her poop in a group so I could read about a grown up instead of a plasticine doll in a romance novel.

The hero was even more of a vanilla character, if that’s possible. Aside from a device for sexual gratification, C.L. (and I am not even going to tell you what that stands for) is some kind of vigilante crossed with an accountant - he’s trying to figure out if Maddie’s husband was a shady businessman - which aside from making him a homosexual puppy beater, having him cheat little old ladies out of their money is a quick path to bastard status. C.L. was a nice enough guy, and I loved reading about his family, but did I get the sense that, were I Maddie, I’d swoon over him? Not at all.

The best friend was such a shitful friend, aside from instant babysitting and pushy attitude when needed, that I didn’t like her in the slightest, and kept wondering if her nasty secretiveness was a way for Crusie to point me in the direction of suspecting her of villainy. Then best friendy witch would do something honorable, like make sure Maddie and C.L. had time alone together, and I figured she couldn’t be all bad. But I still didn’t like her, and I didn’t root for her happily ever after, either. I wanted to smack her around for being such a grumpy witch.

This is probably one of the first times I’ve ever read a book where the heroine annoyed me so much I couldn’t bring myself to give a shit about her. I just didn’t. “I have to protect my daughter!” So you remove any evidence of your husband’s philandering that you might use to divorce his ass and acquire a settlement that would allow you to protect her. “I am not sure what is going on but something bad is happening and someone is after me!” So you hide a gun in the freezer after wiping it for prints, and then hide evidence from various people who might help you.

Shit on a shingle, Maddie, you stunk up the joint.  I think part of the problem is that I’m married to and friends with many attorneys, so to watch you do stupid things and leave yourself wide open - even though I know it’s going to work out in the end - was excruciating.

The only thing I couldn’t decide was whether this was my new all-time low book, or whether the crowne of crappe was still held by Honey Moon, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, which holds the distinction of being the first romance novel to ever make me nauseated. I think SEP still holds the Crappe Crowne, but this book was way down there, too, which makes it doubly disappointing. I hate it when authors I love write something I just can’t stand.

The challenge, I think, with a contemporary is that the author has to write a book set in a time that is close to, or related to, the reader’s reality. I’m supposed to believe, as the reader, that all this mess is happening right now. I’m not expecting the greatest history lesson ever told, and I’m not expecting to learn the inner workings of x-ray machines if the heroine is a medical technician, or the finer points of pool if the hero is a shark, but I do expect a reality I can believe in, even if the story takes place in a state or country I’ve never visited.

Crazy for You is the story of Quinn and Nick, residents of the small town of Tibbett, and long-time best friends. Right away, I’ll just tell you, I am a sucker for best-friends-who-fall-in-love books. Quinn is dating Bill, a tall blonde man who pretty much steers Quinn’s life for her, until Quinn adopts a little dog named Katie who inspires Quinn to stop letting life happen to her, and to start living her life deliberately and with a good deal of daring.

The idea of switching from the role of passive passenger to active driver in one’s life applies to just about every character in the novel, as Quinn’s decision to break up with her “beige boyfriend” and move out of their “beige apartment” first horrifies, then inspires everyone in her life, from her parents to her friends. Quinn lived a good portion of her life as “the good one,” “the fixer,” “the peacemaker,” “the quiet one,” “the dependable one,” existing in the shadow of her sister Zoe, a wild-at-heart adventuresome woman who has settled into wedded bliss after a short and disastrous marriage to Nick twenty years prior.

Nick harbors a secret, ardent desire for Quinn, but being her friend and her ex-brother-in-law is enough to cause him to keep his hands to himself, not to mention her relationships with good, stable Bill, the high school championship-winning coach.

Quinn’s breakup with Bill and decision to live boldly on her own cause shock waves of reaction in all directions, most notably that she becomes aware of Nick’s feelings for her, and watching her wear him down is the most electrically charged reading I’ve enjoyed in awhile.

Let me address the negative points of this book first, because the positives tip the scale towards a much more favorable rating, though the negatives do have to be addressed. First, and how to say this without giving away too much? The nature of Bill’s continued involvement was obvious to me from the very start, and perhaps that was intentional. Perhaps I was supposed to observe his behavior and treatment of Quinn and root for her to get away from him as soon as possible. But Crusie’s efforts in the vilification of Bill seemed to turn rapidly from the subtle to the glaringly, horribly obvious. I won’t give away too much, as I said, but I’ve complained about this before as a technique for evilization, and I will tell you, he ain’t gay.

Further, this is a thin book for a Crusie novel, and what’s missing is the development of the secondary characters to the point where you care about them. In Crazy for You, there was so little backstory and introduction of the secondary set of characters, particularly the women, that I had a really hard time keeping them all straight. I thought for half the book that one of them was the heroine’s second sister, and couldn’t figure out why Quinn never mentioned her when she spoke on the phone to Zoe. One of the valuable and enjoyable aspects of a good Crusie story is that the secondary characters, and the parallel love story that compliments that of the hero and heroine, are clever, interesting people that you care about. You like the hero and heroine better because you like their friends. In this novel, the interaction between Quinn and her friends seemed to assume that I knew them already, when really, I didn’t.

For example, the secondary romance between Nick’s brother Max and his wife was fraught with big misunderstandings and a lot of drastic hair cuts and slammed bedroom doors. It was meant to compliment Quinn’s transformation from passive to active participant in her life, and in some respects watching an existing marriage re-energize itself, though sometimes through some hurtful and passive-aggressive measures, applied the idea of taking charge of one’s life to more than just the young, single heroine types. But after awhile, the slamming of doors and the “you’re not getting any and I’m not telling you why,” got real old.

The final element that really pissed my switch off is a spoiler so you know what to do. I’ll come right out and say it here, Bill turns into a stalker. First he refuses to accept that Quinn has moved out, and continues to try to bulldoze her back into his life and into “their apartment.” Then his behavior grows rapidly bizarre. He breaks shutters on her new house so he can watch her, he abuses her dog because she growls at him when he breaks into her home, he copies a spare key he finds in the house and lets himself in to lie in her bed and steal her clothes, he sabotages her house to the point of causing serious and potentially lethal damage, and in the climax of his bizarreness, he breaks into her house again to move in with her uninvited.

By far my biggest problem: a shady reference to Bill going to jail for “years and years.” Horse. Fucking. Pucky. Stalkers to not go to jail for years and years. Celebrities with documented cases of weird people trying to break in to marry them in the middle of the night can’t prosecute their stalkers successfully, so why would a small town coach be convicted and sent to jail for years and years? Stalking is not punished to nearly the degree that it should be, and to make an exception for a happily ever after yanked me right out of the fantasy and pissed me off.

But now, the good parts, and oh, were there good parts. Candy challenged me to explain why I love a hero that resists, a big lug of a man who tries desperately to fight how he feels for the heroine, trying to convince himself that he’s happier without her, that getting involved will just break his little world in to messy, hard-to-clean pieces. The reason I love this particular type of romance is simple: I met my husband in high school, and for over two years we were great friends while he fought how he felt for me, until he gave up and we became a couple.

He told me later that he knew when we met senior year of high school that I’d “make a lousy girlfriend” but I’d “be a great wife.” This is from a 17-year-old - but you understand that it pissed me off until he explained: if he got involved with me, it would be permanent, and serious, and at 17 he didn’t want that. He wasn’t sure he ever wanted that serious a relationship. But after years of being friends and years of fighting how he felt, he gave in and now he enjoys our romance as hard as he fought it originally. We’ll be married five years in May.

Reading about heroes that are friends with the heroine, while trying desperately to avoid and deny their growing feelings for her, is the best kind of romance for me. Crusie’s development of Nick and Quinn’s romance, well, to quote Candy, when Crusie does it well, I feel it all the way to my tippy toes, and gosh I was blushing on the train I was so happy to watch these two come together. He fought and rationalized and tried to talk himself away from her, and then he made a move on her, she realized how he felt, noticed him in a whole new light, and slowly wore him down until he…well, I can’t spoil that part for you, now can I?

The villain might have been clumsily done at times, but the pure passion and tingly wonderfulness that was Nick and Quinn’s romance made this book a serious treat for me, and I had to stop myself from finishing the book too fast.

As I mentioned when I started, my expectations of a contemporary, particularly a Crusie, are pretty high, and I tolerate a lot less mishigas with the plot and the characters when the novel takes place close to the present time. While the antagonist and the resolution of the elements working against the couple weren’t ideal, the romance more than made up for it.

I just read back over this review and realize I spent more time writing about what the problems were than about what Crusie does right. “The romance is great, trust me” doesn’t seem like enough of a recommendation, but please, do trust me. The emotional depths and internal wrangling from the hero, the heroine’s slow realization that her friend is more to her than she thought – oh, it is just breathtaking, and there’s no one quote that can illustrate it. Small moments and passing thoughts on both sides add up to a marvelous emotional climax as well as a sexual one.

I’ve had to change my rubric: If I’m sorry that I have to send it back because I won’t be able to reread and visit with the characters again, it’s damn good.

Luckily for Daphne, Virgil cocks his toes five years into their not-quite-blissful union, and she’s free to travel to Egypt and follow her interests without his admonishments about her unfeminine pursuits. But that still leaves the problem of having her scholarship being taken seriously by the rest of the world. Enter her lovely and supportive older brother Miles, who helps her by masquerading as a linguistics scholar and thus providing her with a much-needed link to the mainstream of scholarly society.

And then Miles goes and gets kidnapped shortly after he purchases her a rare, beautifully-inscribed papyrus, reputed to hold the secrets to the location of an ancient pharaoh’s tomb, filled with treasure. Daphne runs to the British Consul for help, only to find that the only assistance available is Rupert Carsington, the completely unmanageable fourth son of the Earl of Hargate. He’s huge, spirited and tremendously strong, but he also doesn’t seem all that bright: he’s currently languishing in the depths of one of the nastiest dungeons in Cairo for allegedly trying to take on a large chunk of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s army, single-handedly.

Rupert isn’t stupid, of course. He merely enjoys provoking the very beautiful, very smart Daphne, just to see what she’ll say or do; he also finds that keeping her in a state of high dudgeon helps prevent her from crying, a female state he feels completely unequipped to deal with that drives him absolutely frantic. So he cheerfully declares that thinking is her domain, insists on calling papyri “those brown thingums,” claims her servants’ names are completely unpronounceable and proceeds to call them by English names, and then goes on to flirt outrageously with her. And Daphne can’t help but be attracted to this unpredictable, beautiful man who, infuriating though he may be, actually seems fascinated by her intellectual prowess instead of belittling it.

The budding romance happens during a most delightful adventure story that reminds me in many ways of an Indiana Jones movie, only set in 1821. Daphne and Rupert weather all sorts of attacks by assorted thugs hired by not one, but two different villains, narrowly escape from being trapped in pyramids and other types of ancient Egyptian tombs, rescue some strays along the way, are shot at, stabbed at, have their heads beaten (and do some head-beating of their own) and still somehow manage to save the day (and Miles, of course).

And may I say that Chase does a most excellent job with her villains? She doesn’t make them gay, or hideously ugly, or beat up small animals or children, or anything else of the sort to indicate that they’re Very Nasty People. Instead, they’re two men engaged in a race for Egypt’s slowly dwindling supply of antiquities, and their ambitions have so completely consumed them that it has become a veritable war of one-upmanship. One of the villains actually treats his employees very well and forbids them from being beaten—that is, unless they fail at a crucial task, in which case their punishment is very familiar if you’ve ever read Asterix and Cleopatra.

As in every Chase novel, the witty dialogue is the best feature. Rupert, in particular, won me over with his sly attempts to incense Daphne and his cheerful proclamations of his irresistible charms. Here’s a little sample from the very beginning of the book, where Daphne and the consul’s secretary are picking Rupert up from the Cairo dungeon. Keep in mind he’s still behind bars, and his release is as yet uncertain:

“That man,” she said in low but still audible tones, “is an idiot.”

“Yes, madam, but he’s all we got.”

“I may be stupid,” Rupert said, “but I’m irresistibly attractive.”

“Good grief, conceited too,” she muttered.

“And being a great, dumb ox,” he went on, “I’m wonderfully easy to manage. (…) I’m as strong as an ox, too,” he said encouragingly. “I can lift you up with one hand and your maid with the other.”

“He’s cheerful, madam,” Beechey said, sounding desperate. “We must give him that. Is it not remarkable how he’s kept up his spirits in this vile place?”

Obligingly, Rupert began to whistle.

And I don’t know if you noticed, but when you read Chase dialogue, you can actually hear the British accents in your head. Chase has an uncanny knack for the correct rhythm and cadences of British speech, and never resorts to random ‘tis-ing and ‘twas-ing in an attempt to recreate “authentic” historical speech patterns.

I only have two very, very minor complaints with this book. One of them falls into the realm of petty nitpicking, but really, I hate it when authors do this. One of the villains is described as having tawny hair and eyes at the beginning of the book, but towards the end of the book his eyes mysteriously change to blue. This pulls me out of the story and sends me on a frantic search for eye color references in other parts of the book the way few other errors can.

The other flaw has to do with what I feel are too many references to Alistair Carsington, Rupert’s older brother and the hero of Miss Wonderful (another excellent book). I felt that Rupert’s references to Alistair add something to the book in only two spots during the story; the other mentions started to sound repetitive after a while. Yes, we know Alistair is a Waterloo hero; yes, we know he limps. Get on with the seduction and/or the skullduggery already!

Anyway, if you like your heroes big, protective and confident without being annoyingly arrogant; if you like intelligent, strong-willed heroines who don’t indulge in Too Stupid To Live behavior; if you enjoy zippy dialogue and adventure stories that swash and buckle along with great flair—you’ll probably enjoy Mr. Impossible. God knows I did. Now I’m just antsy with anticipation for the next book in this series, featuring the oldest Carsington brother, Benedict.

I know, y’all can’t wait to read the no doubt four or five blog entries I’ll dedicate to my obsessive attempts to get my hands on a copy as soon as humanly possible. 

The Unsung Hero has four stories entwined in the plot – yup, you read that right. Four. The main story is the romance between Lieutenant Tom Paoletti and Dr. Kelly Ashton. Paoletti spend key moments of his badass teenage years prior to his enlisting in the Navy living on the Ashton estate outside of Boston. His uncle, Joe, was Kelly’s father gardener, and young Tom had it bad for Kelly, who had it equally bad for him. After a hot and horny kiss and an invitation to meet later in the treehouse (and how on earth that would be comfortable is beyond me) Paoletti smells the coffee before he climbs that treehouse ladder, realizes that young Kelly is jailbait, and hightails it out of town, joining the Navy and spending the next sixteen years ascending through the ranks to commander of an elite SEAL team.

In the beginning of the novel, Lt. Paoletti sustains one mother of a head injury and is placed on a month’s medical leave pending psychological evaluation. As he flies into Logan to spend his leave with his uncle Joe on the Ashton estate, he thinks he sees an international terrorist in the baggage claim, and is convinced that either he’s just seen the impossible, or his head injury has rendered him utterly insane.

Now, as an aside, I completely believe that there are terrorists in Logan airport. Hell, two of the September 11th flights took off from Logan, and one from Newark, the airport I fly in and out of regularly. So there was no suspension of reality required on my part that a terrorist would be claiming his luggage at Logan, though in this novel, the idea that Lt. Paoletti may or may not be non compos mentis is part of the tension in the plot.

Dr. Kelly Ashton has come home to live with her father, Charles, who has been diagnosed with “cancer of the everywhere,” and is trying to reconnect with him emotionally as he lives out his last weeks. Charles is in the midst of a doozy of a fight with his gardener and best friend, Joe Paoletti, Tom’s uncle. The 50th anniversary of the Fighting 55th Regiment’s battle in Nazi-occupied France is being celebrated by their town the following week, and Joe is participating in a newspaper interview about the heroic rescue of the 55th, made possible by OSS spies living and hiding in the occupied French town of St. Helene.

Kelly and Tom don’t know what to make of the ongoing battle between Joe and Charles, who have been friends for 50 years any more than they know what to make of the electric attraction between them. Neither was aware of Joe and Charles’ roles in the battle that marked a turning point in WWII, or that Joe and Charles had even been in France during the war. Neither man is speaking about it, or speaking to each other for that matter, leaving Tom and Kelly to try to manage Charles’ health, Joe’s sudden temper, and their own emotional storms. As the novel progresses, Joe and Charles reminisce about the events leading up to the 55th Regiment’s battle with the Nazis, and the reasons why neither man ever spoke of the war after they returned to Boston together, Charles to his ancestral home, and Joe as his newly-hired gardener and already-established best friend.

The third story operating between Kelly, Tom, Joe, and Charles is that of Tom’s niece, Mallory, who is followed in the park one day by a shy, geeky young college student named David Sullivan who wants to photograph and sketch Mallory for his graphic novel. Mallory is the daughter of the town ho, and as such is wary of anyone who shows interest in her, assuming the allure is her physique, a feature that she inherited from her mother, and the idea that she might be an easy conquest, a habit that she did not inherit from her mother. Since David wants Mallory to pose in a bikini with another attractive college student, Mallory is first suspicious, then intrigued. Their story is an adorable encounter of young love between two people who are just beginning to define who they are, and who they want to be.

The plot that pulls these three stories together is that of a terrorist possibly on the loose in a small Boston suburb. As Lt. Paoletti encounters this man several times over the span of a week, he begins to believe that his suspicious are correct, and a terrorist presumed dead for years has surfaced. But since Tom can’t pinpoint why this man has surfaced, what he wants, or why he’s there, and he can’t cull together sufficient evidence to convince his superiors that the situation warrants attention and immediate action, Tom is forced to both question his own sanity and ability to lead his team of SEALS, and to pull together a makeshift team of any and all available officers who are willing to sacrifice their time off to come to his aid.

And herein begins the story of Sam and Alyssa, which I first encountered in a later novel, after Sam and Alyssa had acknowledged and done some horizontal damage to attempt to alleviate the explosive attraction between them. Sam Starrett and Alyssa Locke are part of Tom’s assembled team, and watching the beginning of a relationship that I already knew would carry forward into the backstories of subsequent novels before climaxing in a novel of their own was both a pleasure in terms of the entertainment, and a lesson in how a good writer keeps the reader interested. I know novels like the “Outlander” series carry backstories forward into other works that focus on other couples, but this was my first encounter with a plotline that I knew would continue for several volumes, and seeing its inception was lovely. If it was indeed the inception of the Sam and Alyssa storyline – as I said, I found conflicting reports about which novel marked the “start” of the plot.

The terrorist story drives the Sam & Alyssa, Mallory & David, Joe & Charles, and Tom & Kelly stories sufficiently with enough pace and twisty turns to keep me interested, and I started this book on the airplane from the Dominican Republic on Friday, and finished it early Sunday morning, after tackling a botched pickup at the airport, and then coming home to a house with no heat, and a delayed trip to pick up the dog at the boarders. If I’d been on vacation still, I could have read through this book in an afternoon, not because it was easy, but because the plot was tough and scary and demanded my attention. I never got distracted or confused, even though names like “Tom,” “Joe,” and “Charles,” are rather bland and can easily get mixed up before one comes to know the characters.

However, the strengths of the plot are not enough to cover two flaws that prevent me from giving this book an A rating. One, too many romance novels rely on a “big misunderstanding” device to push the heroine and hero apart and then together again. Kelly and Joe suffer something of a “big misunderstanding” plotline in the late middle of the book, mostly because both people neglect to be honest about their feelings, even though they’ve been honest and downright forthcoming about other issues, including Tom’s possible sighting of a terrorist in town, and his fears that his head injury has scrambled his mental eggs.

Second, I could tell the minute the full plot was divulged exactly why the sighted terrorist might have found motivation to be in a sleepy Boston suburb, and I had a hard time accepting why Tom didn’t also immediately identify the motive. I mean, if this guy is smart enough to extract politically connected socialites form hostile countries with a Plan Alpha, and a Plan Beta, how’d he miss such an obvious reason for a terrorist to be in town? I won’t say more, but the fact that the hero, a military leader, had such a giant blind spot for the sake of plot development did not sit well with me. But then, I get pissed off when television show characters do things I find inconsistent with their personalities, and spend a lot of time yelling a the screen.

However, the themes of the novel, and the characters themselves were enough to ensure that, unlike some of the books I brought with me, this book came back home with me, and was not donated to the resort library. Brockmann’s exploration of love, risk, choice, heroism and bravery in everyday and in exceptional circumstances was fascinating, and I’m going to rearrange my BooksFree queue to include some of the other books in the “Tall, Dark, and Dangerous” series.