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

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.