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

Would you have them locked in a dungeon? Kidnapped and held for ransom? Would you make them neighbors and then have one of the pipes in an apartment burst, forcing the other to take refuge in the dry apartment while repairs are made? Cause a rock to fall on the heroine’s head leaving her with partial amnesia where the hero is concerned, allowing him to date her under false pretenses? Have one of them become superglued to the other and then to a chair so they can’t call for help, nor can they get to the bathroom to pour nail polish remover all over themselves? Or have a zany uncle leave them his entire estate, to the exclusion of a host of other relatives,provided the hero and heroine move into said estate for six months’ time, not leaving the presence of the other for more than 48 hours?

If you picked the last one, well, you must have read this book. “A Will and A Way” places Pandora and Michael, the not-blood-related niece and nephew of a goofy and now deceased Uncle Jolley, owner and multi-billionaire inhabitant of a catskills estate called...wait for it… come on… you can see it coming...Jolley’s Folly.

Yeah. So down the road of predictability we go: Michael and Pandora stand to inherit a bajillion dollar estate if they live in the house for six months; the rest of the relatives are left with inconsequential things like books of matches to light fires under one’s ass, or the exact sum needed to buy wheat germ for life. If they can’t agree to move in to the giant, hulking mansion for six months, then the estate will revert to the other relatives in equal shares, along with some institute for the study of carnivorous insects.

I’m not kidding.

So Michael and Pandora are pissed because they don’t want to live with each other, and while Pandora is wealthy in her own right, neither is comfy with inheriting billions of dollars (whyever not I can’t even figure). The relatives who got the shaft are pissed and now in the position of hoping Michael and Pandora kill or run out on each other. But ultimately they agree to try living in the vast multi-winged expanse of the house together, much to the displeasure of the rest of the kooky family, and away the story goes.

It doesn’t get much more believable than that. I got the feeling Roberts sat down with a trading card deck full of common romance plot devices and frequently used conventions and shuffled them together to create this book. Usually, even operating with the most common of plotlines, Roberts can create a character, usually the hero as I love her men, who is so fascinating I’d put up with kidnapping, amnesia, witness protection, or God forbid even a secret freaking baby, so long as Roberts wrote at least one good character.

Neither of the characters are even remotely interesting to me, and nor are they too smart. First, it’s a huge house. Go live in separate wings. Don’t talk to each other. Don’t see each other. You already know that she designs award-winning jewelry by day, while he writes Emmy-award-winning television scripts by night. You don’t even have to same schedule. Just don’t talk to each other!

Look, I have to go to Passover Seder with an entire wing of my husband’s family that I find less than lovely to be around. If I can put up with them, and their merry ingestion of the four cups of wine that are part of the Seder service, then you can live six months in a mansion with someone you don’t actually have to see.

Second, what is all this animosity based on anyway? I mean, she designes jewelry. He writes scripts. Both creative professions. You’d think there’s some common ground there, but no, they actually snipe at each other by criticizing one another’s creative efforts! She designs “ugly baubles for rich women;” he writes “mindless entertainment for idiots.” Gosh, I know there’s professional jealousy in the artistic community but that’s a little extreme.

It’s not as if they are jealous of each other’s relationship with their dead uncle. They call a truce of momentary duration while talking to each other about how sad they are, will and inheritance nonsense aside. So where the animosity comes from is peculiarly unexplained. I know plenty of people who get under my skin, and I know why they do. And either I put up with it or I avoid them. I don’t go after them for more insults and fighting. Usually there’s a root source, a larger reason why they would be so pissed at each other. In this case, there’s none. It’s one more invented plot contrivance to draw the story along towards the final page. The characters don’t lead the story; the plot doesn’t either. Roberts drags them along and pushes them forward with the tip of her pen, forcing them together, forcing them into Grave Danger That Forces Admissions of Emotional Attachment, and wrapping their ending up neatly at the final page. I am amazed one of them didn’t say to the other, “Oh, now it’s time for me to get ‘accidentally’ locked in the basement so you can worry that someone is up to no good!”

The worst is that the source of all this ire is supposed to be because they are secretly in love with one another. If you love someone, even secretly, why would you put yourself in a position repeatedly such that the object of your adoration puts down your very personal creations that, coincidentally, pay your bills, thus allowing you to live on doing exactly what you enjoy doing. Wouldn’t the criticism do lasting, painful damage, coming from someone you purportedly love?

Aside from the woefully contrived conflict between the hero and the heroine, the external forces working against the protagonists are sketched with one of those inch-wide Crayola cubby-hands crayons. The relatives, who, DUH, of course are going to try to interfere with the terms of Michael and Pandora’s cohabitation to force them to be apart for periods of more than 48 hours, are all caricatures of various types, from the earthy-crunchy health duo, recipients of the lifetime supply of wheat germ, to the harshly inconsiderate brother, recipient of not a thing, and his ineffectual sister, who received a house in Palm Beach. You know they’re bad news, even the attorney thinks they’re kind of creepy, and yet the protagonists think the rest of the clan is going to go merrily into the evening without a worry or concern that, should the two of them be apart for two days, they suddenly receive an enormous inheritance, each.

So of course weird shit starts happening - ransacking, tampering, accidents that are two convenient for accidental cause, and false information being acted upon without proper verification on the part of the hero or heroine. Jeez. These two are dumb as hell. And even as the weird shit starts to become more menacing, not that it didn’t start with a rather frightening event in the first place, they agree NOT to call the police. I’m guessing there was a sentence edited out where the heroine says, “No, we should not call the police, even though millions of dollars of my personal property was tossed on the floor and left there. To call the police would mean a much too quick resolution to the drama, and we have two hundred pages to go!”

Further, the two servants, loyal and true of heart, are perfect in every way, serving as plot devices to push the two together, faking fainting spells and colds and general old agedness, causing the hero and heroine to clean, cook their own meals, and be around each other frequently.

The kicker moment is the climax of all the drama. The hero and heroine gather the family into the house and...oh it’s too stupid. Dare I tell you? Dare I spoil this marvelously predictable mess?

The hero and the heroine gather the family in the mansion, tell them that the gig is up, they know who has been causing all the problems and trying to kill them both, and then - the lights go out! People scream! And when the lights come on, there’s the heroine in a pool of blood, a bloody letter opener next to her, while the hero calmly stands over her and says that one of the family is a murderer. I shit you not. It was like one of those bad plays acted out where YOU are part of the DRAMA, and you have to go solve the MURDER in your own HOME.

And of course this whole melodrama wrings a confession out of the appropriate people and they all live happily ever after, as the hero and heroine have fallen marvelously in love with one another and will now cohabitate as Husband and Wife in their mutually admired artistic endeavors.

But wait! Before you rush right out and buy this thing, I never told you the very best part! The most wonderous, marvelous, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious next best thing?

This book is a two-novel set!! There are two books in one as Silhouette tries to milk the last dollars it can out of Nora Roberts, since she did not renew her contract with them. The next one? Oh, you’ll never guess. The hero and heroine are the younger members of two familes who are long time rivals and neighbors. You will never guess what the families’ competing interests are.

No really, give it a try.

Diamond mining? Software development? Hardware stores? Flower shops?

No.

I’m not even kidding.

Ranching, cattle, and oil.

Cue the “Dallas” theme. 

Night Pleasures is the story of Kyrian of Thrace, a Dark-Hunter (and why the hyphen? Is this like the Waldorf=Astoria differentiating itself with an equal sign?) who surrendered his soul to fight Daimons, who prey on humans. Daimons have wonderfully potent assorted powers but a lifespan of only 27 years (paging Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, please report to Sherrilyn Kenyon’s house for use as inspiration for Daimon characters, STAT) and so they start consuming human souls to extend their lives.

Due to their predilection for soul consumption, and their general evilness, Daimons are the targets of the Dark-Hunters and have been for thousands of years, dating back to the times of the Greek gods and goddesses. Kenyon bases her paranormal world on a great deal of Greek mythology, and gods such as Artemis and Apollo make appearances in the history of the fictional world the characters inhabit. The world itself is fascinating, and presents an epic good vs. evil struggle of which all humans remain blissfully unaware, but the hero and heroine of this particular story do not really live up to the noble and epic backdrop on which they meet.

Amanda Deveraux is the plain-Jane twin sister of a vampire huntress named Tabitha. Amanda is an accountant and is constantly embarrassed by her psychically gifted and beyond-paranormal family, as they are each weird in their own way. One is a sorceress, Tabitha’s a huntress, and their mother sees auras. And one of them is a midwife- nice way to subtly imply the midwife/witch historical rumor, there. They are all magically delicious, and Amanda can’t stand it. She’s looking for as plain a vanilla life as she can get.

Kyrian of Thrace is chasing an uber-Daimon who has unheard-of powers and has bested several Dark-Hunters. Betrayed by his wife back when he was a royal Greek mortal two thousand years prior, Kyrian was given the chance for vengeance and immortality by becoming a Dark-Hunter. Thus, Kyrian is strong, handsome, immortal, noble, brave, loyal, and utterly, fabulously wealthy, and therefore, annoyingly perfect. His only flaw, and it’s not even much of one, is that he doesn’t trust women and is tormented by his memories of his mortal life, in which he was a bit of a bastard to his family. A little sex ought to take care of that, don’t you think?

Amanda is equally perfect, and though she cannot stand anything paranormal, the minute she and Kyrian meet, it is hot lusty looks and endlessly expressed wishes for physical intimacy. It’s always great when the hero and heroine are humpingly hot for one another, but when that’s the only thing drawing them together, it’s not satisfying, it’s not romantic, and it’s certainly not memorable.

The duration of their epic battle against evil is fraught with much peril, and the endless cycle of “his and hers” drama: Will we be able to Be Together? Can I Trust Her? Does he Want Me? The author constantly reassures the reader of their undying lust and they are constantly gazing at each other with the hunger one might see in my eyes at sundown on Yom Kippur after a 24 hour fast. I look at a bagel with plenty of lust, let me tell you.

But there is little development of their emotional attachment, so their relationship seems simple, flat, and transparent. They have lust, therefore they are drawn together. He is perfect and noble. She is brave and feisty, and appropriately gifted with clever skills and powers at the perfect moment. Perfection in all regards: except there is very little emotional development on either side once that lust is acknowledged and acted upon. The personal issues they overcome to be worthy of one another, which are usually a key element in an epic struggle and romance, are pithy at best and seem too easily remedied, usually by some hot bumpy humpin’.

For example after Kyrian and Amanda get it on, he loses his power. Seriously. He came and it went. He enjoys the afterglow and realizes he’s a helpless weakling with a bad, bad headache. His squire and another Dark-Hunter correctly assume that this is only temporary, and indeed it is, though it comes at a time when Kyrian can ill afford to be vulnerable. A few pages later, he’s got his mojo back, but there’s little revealed about how his recovery came about. Was it a gradual recharge or did he wake up a day later able to kick ass and take names again? And of course, let me just continue to spread the giggles: for the rest of their sexual encounters, he refrains from orgasm because he cannot be powerless, so he implores her to “come for both of them.” Yeah. I know. I’m right there with you. AS IF.

And thus my major beef with this book: throughout the entirety, I couldn’t figure out if I liked it. I like paranormals. I like vampire fiction. I dig romance. I like hot sex in a romance. I like cool weapons, battles with supernatural powers, and characters that rise up to the occasion and kick some serious patoot. Night Pleasures has all of these and still manages to be plain. It’s served up like food from a restaurant that is reported to be fabulous but then makes you yearn for Hamburger Helper and the tv remote. Unmemorable in this respect means terribly disappointing, particularly when one considers that it could have been so very much better. I keep reading back over this review and am surprised at how scathing I am, but one of my major peeves with romance is the amount of dreck that comes out that sounds like it’s going to be a gangbusters novel and is so routine and mass-produced that it pisses me off. This book falls square in the low grade territory because my reaction was “Don’t Waste My Money and Don’t Waste My Time.” And also, “Grrrr!” peppered with “As if!”

The resolution of the battle is just as perfect as the main characters. Having once again been tricked by the evil uber-Daimon, who comes across as a whiny, petulant two-year-old with nuclear strength toys and no friends rather than as a scary evil dude, Kyrian and Amanda must face him down to defeat his evil. In a twist on the drunk-father-made-me-evil bit, uber-Daimon’s father is revealed to have been Bacchus, who gave his son the royal shaft by refusing to intervene when uber-D’s lifespan is almost up. Now he pursues Amanda, because he senses her incredible untapped power and he wants his for his very, very own.

Allow me to ruminate for a moment, here. The balance of power is one of the key elements of a paranormal for me, and how each author handles a pair where only one contains the superpowers is always interesting. One expects the hero to be rich, and some authors of historicals play with the idea of the heroine having the money. One expects one or both to be attractive; again, some play with average looks but eventually fall onto another attribute that makes the plain character unique. Other authors charge the hero with emotional growth such that he gets over his expectation that his girl be a supermodel and learns to appreciate a real-sized, sharp-witted average woman as a sign of his worthiness. So what to do when one person can lift cars and move objects with a thought, and the other can’t?

It’s akin to the idea of an aristocrat marrying a commoner. Some authors arrange for the discovery of an unknown title, thus bringing both characters to the same social level. Others allow the social imbalance to be one of the issues the couple must work through, and refuse to “save” the commoner with the long-lost earldom.

In the case of paranormals and power imbalance, if one character is superhuman and the other is merely human, any number of things can happen, just as in a historical novel. Sometimes the human is revealed to be a secret superhuman, or has the ability to become superhuman. Other times the superhuman must return to human status, a convention I often find disappointing. Either way, a conversion takes place, and now restored to quasi-equal status, they can live happily ever after. This is almost expected when one character is immortal, as the reader cannot believe in happily ever after if the reader knows one character will age and die while the other remains permanently youthful.

But what to do when one character will undoubtedly have powers that the other lacks? In the case of this novel, the power balance shifts dramatically back and forth in the final pages, and the resolution is so unsatisfying I sneered over the ending. In the course of kidnapping and controlling the heroine, the bad guy easily “unlocks” the long denied and despised Whitman’s sampler of powers in the heroine. After years of denying and locking up her considerable paranormal resources, one bad guy with the ability to get inside her head can allow her to flex her considerable psychic muscle. Suddenly she can make shit fly across the room, though of course she allows her now-human but still powerful man to fight the final battle and destroy the evil bad guy while she clutches a Barbie doll with a weapon hidden in her feet. No I’m not making that up. Talk about symbolism!

Once they walk into the sunshine and into their happily ever after, an epilogue informs us of the new balance of powers. She is indeed a sorceress, but is he a mere mortal beside her? Of course not. His powers remain, or some of them, after his mortal soul is restored, even though prior explanations of how a Dark-Hunter gets his soul back imply that once he regained mortality, he would be a normal mortal human. But he can’t be weaker than his now-sorceress girl, now can he? That wouldn’t wash. So his superpowers, in diluted and never-fully-explained form, remain. He is off the hook as far as Dark-Hunting is concerned, but he has enough mojo leftover to “protect them.” Meanwhile, she can likely glance at a building and move it three feet to the left, so what protection does she need, really? At least the reassurance is there, so we won’t remember him walking off into the sunset, emasculated beside his Powerpuff Girl of a wife.

All About Romance’s review of this book fell between one reviewer who gave it a marginally higher grade, and another who loathed it. The reviewer who enjoyed it said, “Sometimes you just have to go with it, you know?” Usually I have that attitude, but the mediocrity and processed perfection of the book made it rote and boring, so I couldn’t go with it. I felt like reading this book was akin to watching a rerun, or worse, an entirely and frustratingly predictable new episode of a show I usually like. In fact, an Amazon reviewer likened it to “a poorly scripted, poorly acted made-for-TV movie on the Sci-Fi channel.” Amen to that. I’ve read plenty of books that sounded good but ended up average. It’s somewhat more rare for a book to have limitless potential and fall so far short of memorable that it pissed me off.

It actually starts off quite well, with a rather lively writing style. At her father’s deathbed, Sarah Hamilton, our republican heroine (if I had a shot of alcohol every time the word “republican” was used in this book, I’d be dead from anaphylactic shock before page 90) promises to go to England to seek her uncle, the Earl of Westbrooke. Due to a series of unfortunate events, however, she loses her luggage and much of her money. On the eve of her arrival at the Westbrooke estate, she finds herself stuck at an inn and mistaken for a prostitute. She’s promptly hustled into a bedroom that she erroneously assumes is hers, where she undresses (no nightrail because of her lost luggage, so isn’t that terribly convenient?) and promptly falls asleep.

James Runyon, Duke of Alvord, like Galahad of old, is the flower of British manhood: pure and clean and virtuous. Also naked, but unlike the title suggests, he doesn’t spend much of his time in the book in the altogether. However, like many romance novel heroes, he suffers from hypertrophic penile dysfunction once he takes a gander at the beautimous, completely bare republican snoozing in his bed, and the condition persists for much of the book.* (Hey, have I mentioned how often Sarah is called a republican in this book? I have? The repetition is tiresome, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve made my point, why belabor it, right? Don’t you want me to shut up about this already? GOOD. This gives you an idea of how annoying this book becomes as it progresses.)

So where was I before the Spring Snark Attack dragged the last paragraph under? Oh yes, James. He sees a naked, pretty lady in his bed and tries to rouse her because really, he’s not into prostitutes, though he appreciates his best friend Robbie’s efforts to help him get laid. However, Sarah is so exhausted she doesn’t even so much as twitch, the poor lambie. So our Duke of Much Bareassedness, being pretty tired himself, hops into bed next to her, but like a true gentleman, doesn’t ravish her in her sleep despite his manfully turgid state.

Oh, the massive brouhaha when they wake up in the morning with the nekkidness and the virginal trembling and the outrage and the pillow tossing and the misunderstandings and mm-hey the glavin. (By the way, unlike tossing a salad, I don’t think there’s a prurient definition attached to tossing pillows—yet. Please feel free to suggest definitions in the comments. I’d love to come home tonight and huskily tell my husband to “toss my pillows, bitch.")

Once everything is sorted out and everyone and his (clothed) uncle come to check what the ruckus is about, James finds out the woman is not a dirrrty hoooor. She is, in fact, his best friend Robbie’s American (no, wait, republican) cousin. And Sarah is horrified to find out that her uncle died a year before. The man responsible for mistaking her for a prostitute and getting her in this mess in the first place is now her closest relative.

James, personally, is delighted at the turn of events because he has this BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE cousin who’s been trying to kill him, and he wants to get married and pop out sons as fast as possible. Sarah is beautiful, she’s his best friend’s cousin, she smells real purty, and he has very publicly ruined her, so hey, why not?

Sarah isn’t so thrilled and flatly refuses to marry James. She doesn’t want to marry a rake. But specifically, Sarah equates bad marriages and profligacy with the English ton and loving, happy marriages with being American. This borderline xenophobic fear of the English and her veneration of Americans as the models for all marital virtues makes me wonder what version of America she lived in. I mean, wasn’t there an extremely public scandal involving a certain Founding Father boinking someone else’s wife, then being forced into confessing it publicly? And I also seem to remember reading about another Founding Father facing widespread allegations of having a taste for the badonka-donk when he was serving his first term as president.

Anyway, this “no rakes for me” nonsense started to grate on me. He’s nice to her, he’s handsome, he kisses well, he smells good, he’s beyond patient with her, he treats her like a queen, and she keeps on assuming he’s a master cockmongerer without actually telling him her actual fears. And that’s another problem with the book: I have no freaking clue how or why these two fall in love since they don’t spend a lot of time alone with each other, and when they do, they don’t talk very much. James usually latches onto her ta-tas, which of course causes her knees to weaken, and hey presto, they’re making out like horny little weasels. When they do talk, the book is almost schizophrenic in tone. For instance, James can’t bear to say the word “whore” in front of Sarah, yet earlier in the book they engage in an excruciatingly detailed conversation about prostitution without so much as twitching an eyebrow. And of course clamping onto her nipples like a drowning man grabbing at a straw is perfectly acceptable. Seeing the two of them interact more often than not made me go “What the fuck?”

There’s a suspense side-plot of sorts involving Richard Runyon, James’s cousin and next in line to inherit the title. Richard wants to be the duke, and he’ll stoop at nothing to get it. And make no mistake, he could not be more villainous short of planting a giant red neon sign on his head that says “PSYCHOTIC VILLAIN HERE” with a blinky arrow that points down, and maybe cueing Darth Vader’s theme every time he walks onto a scene. Allow me to bust out a little bulleted list.

• He’s bisexual, and as y’all know, all you need to do to make a romance novel villain Super Evil++ is to have him be a Connoisseur of Cock.
• He rapes women.
• He kills with little to no provocation.
• He’s sadistic.
• This one is actually pretty funny: When Richard is enraged, he starts breaking shit. Throughout the book, he tosses and flings aside glasses, dishes, cream pots and teapots with great zest and abandon. No wonder he wants to succeed to the title and fortune so badly; replacing all the china and breakable tchotchkes he’s thrown about in a blind rage—and he’s in a blind rage A LOT—has to cost a mint.

Worst of all, the author never really bothers explaining why Richard is so insane. No, wait, actually she kind of does. It’s spoiler-ish, though, so you know what to do. Brace yourself, it’s a really, really stupid reason. Apparently Richard’s this way because his dad spanked him when he was four years old for being mean to James. No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. That’s all the motivation the reader is provided for Richard’s batshittiness. GAAAH.

The book also contains a very amateurish mistake near the end of the book, but this isn’t just the author’s fault because the editors should’ve caught it, too. One moment James and Sarah are engaged and the announcement is in the papers (causing Richard fly into a passion and fling yet another piece of china at his hapless lover’s head), the next moment they’re getting married and nobody in the book has any idea they were engaged in the first place. Not only that, but an event that took place over 100 pages before and several weeks ago is also referenced as having taken place just the previous night. Whoever the copy editor is for this book, she needs to be deprived of cookies until she learns to do her job properly. Bad copy editor, no sweeties for you! *slaps wrist*

Despite the multitude of problems—a plot that doesn’t make much sense, the silliest villain I’ve ever encountered, a heroine who’s an annoying prig, a hero who’s nice enough but is pretty much unremarkable, and for the bonus round, a big honkin’ continuity mistake—the book was surprisingly readable. The tone swings wildly from Regency England ("making micefeet of things") to twentieth-century American (”Okay, sweetheart"), but given the other problems, this actually didn’t bother me too much. There were spots though, such as the very beginning of the book, that had a pleasant liveliness to it, and those few spots were what saved this book from the Dreaded F.

*A side note: Romance novel heroes really need to learn to masturbate instead of walking around with a persistent hard-on all through the book. Really, it’s not that hard. *pause, snicker* OK, it IS hard, but if you take matters in your own hands and give the matters a little rub-a-dub-dub, it takes care of things quite nicely and the hardness subsides. See? Congratulations, you’re now a 28-year-old who has finally learned to master his domain, something most males figure out by the time they’re 13.

The plot is simple enough. Fallon Gilchrist (what the hell kind of name is “Fallon” for a socialite in 19th-century Boston, anyway?) is an artist, and somewhat of a recluse after her husband’s death. Gilchrist couldn’t screw worth a damn, of course; this is Romance Novel Commandment No. 43, which says “Thou shalt not suffer a heroine who hath great orgasms to live, unless she hath sexual congress with the hero and only the hero.” Fallon has fallen into a creative and social rut, so her best friend, Anna, decides to shock her out of it. The Boston Women’s Auxiliary holds an auction for Montague Bridgeman, who’s quite the studly stud, to help raise funds for the library. Whoever wins the auction gets to keep him for a week. (Please ignore this glaring historical improbability, because this is the least of the book’s problems—seriously). Anna wins the auction and proudly presents the hunka burnin’ love to Fallon.

“Bridge,” as he likes to be called, is allegedly to be used as Fallon’s model, but of course by page 17 they’re humping like crazed ferrets. And somewhere along the way the two of them fall in love. And—ugh, I can’t even work up the energy to come up with a decent summary of what happens next. So the seven days are spent in humpalicious bliss (although when I went through the book and counted the days they actually only spent four together), and in that space of time they realize they can’t live without each other yet they still separate for completely pointless reasons that I can’t fathom, Fallon’s artistic juices are fully flowing again (as well as her other juices—Lawless never ever lets us forget the state of Fallon’s wetness, I mean Jesus Keeee-rist this woman’s poonanny bears a terrifying resemblance to a faucet whenever she’s around Bridge) and bla bla bla hump hump hump they all lived happily ever after.

To call the characters in this book “cardboard caricatures” would be to insult cardboard, which is a really useful product when you think about it. Fallon is such a bland non-entity that I can’t even come up with a whole lot to say about her. She married a bland man, lives a bland life, and other than a stupendously well-lubricated cooch, I honestly can’t think of any distinguishing characteristics about her.

Bridge isn’t much better. He’s supposed to be deep, because right when he meets Fallon, he makes this astoundingly profound pronouncement about art, artists and their subjects:

“For you and I are both aware you need to get to know the ‘me,’ inside as well as out. Only then will you be able to capture my true essence. (…) Every artist longs to capture his subject’s true essence. The ability to do so is what separates the good from the truly great.”

Apparently finding out his true essence involves frenzied tit-humping, lots of blowjobs and gnawing on his asscheeks. We also find out Bridge was in a war (presumably the Civil War) and is suitably tortured about it, but only in the most superficial way. Behold, the existential angst suffered by Our Hero as described by this piece of deathless prose:

He’d given up trying to gauge why he had been spared when other good men, men a damn sight better than he’d ever be, had fallen like flies. It was too much to understand.

Did you hear that? Damn good men had been killed pointlessly in a war. What a very novel thought! Oh the philosophical and moral conundrums it presents!

But most of the time Bridge’s thoughts are occupied with Fallon’s melon-like breasts and perpetually moist hoo-ha, which is a blessing because all that deathless prose was making me gag.

And speaking of deathless prose: the euphemisms used for body parts in this book made me laugh out loud several times. The first time was when Fallon’s ‘giney was referred to as a “honeypot.” Goddamn. A honeypot. Thanks to the good folks at Honeybucket, though, a port-a-potty was my most immediate association when I read that word. And a few pages on, Fallon’s Chunnel of Love is called a “hot little box.” I’m serious. I was waiting to see if it would be eventually referred to as a “bearded clam” or a “cum-bucket” and thus seal my theory that Taboo was actually written by the same people who write all those letters to Penthouse, but alas, I was destined to be disappointed.

The rest of the prose, when not coming up with hilarious words for our naughty bits n pieces, is awkward. In fact, it downright lurches. It switches between fairly modern cadences to extremely clumsy ‘tis-ing and ‘twas-ing. Hey, everyone knows that all you have to do to replicate authentic 19th-century speech is to use those contractions. ‘Tis a fact.

See?

The sex scenes themselves weren’t too bad. They got kind of numbing and repetitive after a while, but some of them were pretty stimulating. So that, coupled with the excellent cover, raised this book a half-grade and saved it from D- territory.

But other than the hothotHOT cover and the two scenes that were actually pretty sexy, I really can’t recommend this book. The emotional interaction between the characters is wooden at best and contrived at worst, the prose style is pretty awful and the plot is pretty much non-existent. Even as a piece of titillation it doesn’t work all that well, because more often than not it’s kind of a snooze-fest. Unless you’re looking for a historical that uses the words “box” and “pantiless” with wild abandon, skip this one. Trust me. ‘Twould never do for me to lie to my faithful readers.

See?

This book is so damn awful I kept reading just to find out who the bad guy was, and so I could keep marking pages of poor and unrealistic dialogue. And since I’ve dogeared half the freaking book, why not share it with you? I’m sure you’ll get the gist of the novel from the quotes alone. But in case you don’t:

The heroine, Karen, is an RN who lives in Ohio with her elderly mother, until said elderly mother dies of the flu. Let’s not even discuss the whole RN-elderly flu idea that maybe she should have toted her mom to the ER for some O2. We’ll just leave that bit of reality aside with the rest of the reality we eschew while reading this dreck.

The hero, Marc, is a New Orleans detective who is investigating the death of a street bum who turns out to be (a) Karen’s estranged father, (b) a Vietnam veteran, (c) a trained and highly skilled sniper from said days in Vietnam, (d) a man suffering from acute Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, hence the estrangement from his wife and daughter, and (e) the keeper of a Very Big secret he threatens to reveal, which is why he ends up dead.

Karen flies to New Orleans to i.d. the body, meets Marc, spends about a day and a half in his company, and they Fall In Luuuuuve ™. Meanwhile, a bunch of nefarious and vanilla-ly named characters (Bob. Hayes. Thomson. Lake.) all scheme to find out what Dear Dead Dad did with the secret, where he put it, and if his daughter has it. Likely the daughter does, so all the assassins of vanilla come after her, leaving her subject to the protection of Detective Marc. What is the secret? Who is after her? What do they want? And why does she think she’s in love with someone she’s known for 90 hours?

Most of the questions, except for that last one, are answered by the end of the book, which is wrapped up so neatly you can see the bow for miles and miles before you get there.

My two biggest problems with this book are the leaps demanded of the reader in believing that the hero and heroine are going to fall instantly and madly in lusty hot burning love with each other after 2 days in each other’s company, and that the heroine is going to be able to save her own life using skills she learned from her Dear Dead Dad more than 20 years prior. If your dad took you into the woods, for example – and this is a hypothetical example, because I wouldn’t want to spoil this complete waste of pulp for you, should you want to read it – at the age of, say, 13, and taught you how to follow deer tracks until you reached their water source, and suddenly you were being followed by assassins, and needed to reach water, and you were 30 plus years old, do you think you would be able to reach flawlessly back into the recesses of your memory to recall each and every directive your Dear Dead and estranged Dad gave you such that you could find water on the very first try?

Please. I learned how to play “Gently, Sweet Afton” on the violin two years ago. I couldn’t pick up a violin this evening and play that flawlessly on the first try if you held a gun to my head.

But this Karen? Oh, she is a marvel. Not only does she save her own ass with skills from the depths of her memory, but she falls for some serious shitful behavior from the hero. Let’s go to the dogeared sections, which in SarahLand mean, “Nuh UH the author did NOT expect me to buy that and pay retail!”

Karen has gone to meet the detective after he calls to tell her about Dear Dead Dad’s death. She’s sat in his office to hear about his demise. She’s identified the body via video from the coroner’s office the following morning. And she’s just left the coroner’s video room:

He knew she had cried; her eyelids were swollen. She had cried, and he hadn’t been there to hold her. He would be, he thought fiercely.

From now on, he would be (Howard, 116).

Please note: I just made the Very Cute Husband read that so I could transpose, and he just said, “I’m going to barf.”

He’d roll over and pass out from horror if I made him read page 128, wherein the heroine, Karen, remarks upon, “the neatness of his ears,” while taking a slow survey of the hero as he stands with his back to her. His ears?!

Further into the story, the heroine compares her feet to the hero’s, remarking on how different they are, with hers “slender, delicately formed, definitely feminine,” and his “big, bony, a little hairy on top” (Howard, 134). This is, as with his fierce thoughts from earlier, the second day of their acquaintance. Most people who meet under difficult and emotional circumstances are not munching ham sandwiches on a balcony and comparing the structure of their feet.

Another problem I had with the writing in this book – aside from (a) the leaps of belief required in accepting both the emotional and sexual aspects of this relationship as valid after two days of acquaintance, and (b) the difficulty in following the development of the mystery contained in the secondary plot – is the descriptions of the sex scenes.

Howard seems to refrain from using words as “dick,” “cock,” and “arousal,” but instead, she just comes out with “penis.” Normally, I’m ok with frank depictions. I mean, that is what the organ in question is called. It’s a penis. But when his “swollen penis” juts out from beneath his shirt, “twitching with arousal,” among lurid and purply descriptions of intimacy, the use of the scientific term is jarring.

Further, the hero does something that I consider incredibly smarmy, but I’ll hide the content below in case you don’t want spoilers:

Karen and Marc are dining on his balcony, eating ham sandwiches and drinking red wine, when he goes inside to put on some music. He comes back out, they dance, and he twirls her down the balcony into the other door- his bedroom. And strip, strip, strip, they’re naked, and he’s already wearing a condom. He’s just been dancing away, wearing a jimmy cap.

Further, aside from sexual scenario weirdness, the hero manages to have bone-jarring sex three times in the space of a few hours (AS IF!), and the third or fourth time, he rolls over and tells the heroine, “I’m going to do you hard this time.”

Hubby adds, for dramatic effect, “UHHH! UUUHHH!” And he is more romantic than this Marc character.

Meanwhile, the Assassins Vanilla, each sporting indistinguishable names, are after Karen, and one burns down her house. But uh oh, he made a mistake. And when his boss calls to tell him so, they have the following conversation:

“She didn’t live there, asshole. She sold the house four months ago.”

“Well, sonofabitch. I hate that. Burning down a house for nothing.”

Gee, me too. I hate burning shit that doesn’t belong to me for no apparent reason.

Seriously? What cold blooded arsonist – or arsehole – says, “Gee, I hate burning down a house for nothing.” I’m dumbfounded by the arsehattedness of this character. It’s like a hardened criminal in and out of prison for years saying “friggin’” or “airhead.”

Now that I think about it, that’s an apt analogy: this book is like the TNT cuss-words-stripped-out-in-favor-of-nonsense equivalent of what might have been a very edgy, suspenseful, scary book, with some hot sexual attraction thrown in for added heat. But the protagonists hopped in the sack after about 36 hours of knowing each other, and the mystery was so confusing and plain yogurt that I didn’t really give a shit either way. This could have been a very, very good book. Instead, it was crap.

The one thing I do give a shit about is the fact that I paid eight goddamn dollars for this book. In fact, this book was so poor that the only credit I can give to it lies in the purpose of this web site. This site exists so that you, dear reader, do not ever have to spend your hard-earned dollars on this dreck, too. Take it from me, this is crap.

“Stay away; stay far, far away,” she thought fiercely.