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

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.

So anyway, on to the review. Here’s some good news: If you really liked Archangel but thought Rachel should’ve dropped the rather stiff-rumped Gabriel for the gorgeous, golden, sweet-natured Obadiah, you’ll be ecstatic because Obadiah finally gets his own story, and it was worth the wait. Shinn weaves together two most excellent stories of two different sets of people falling in love.

The book starts a year and six months after the cataclysmic events that ended Archangel. First, we meet Elizabeth, a wealthy man’s daughter who has fallen on hard times after being orphaned. She currently lives with a cousin on his farm, essentially working as an unpaid servant. When presented with an opportunity to run off to Cedar Hills, a new angel stronghold, she decides to try her luck being an angel-seeker in the hopes she can regain her life of luxury.

Angel-seekers are essentially groupies. These women do their best to establish sexual relationships with angels, not just because angels are powerful, gorgeous and exotic in their own right, but in the hopes of becoming pregnant. If the pregnancy results in an angelic child, their future and status are assured because angel babies are so rare.

Soon after moving to Cedar Hills, Elizabeth strikes up a relationship with the handsome but rather feckless angel David. She also meets an Edori man named Rufus who works as a construction worker. Rufus was a slave until the archangel Gabriel outlawed the practice. He seems to love her, but he can’t give her an angel baby and the cushy life she’s looking for. Quite the dilemma, eh? (If you can’t guess what the outcome is to this love triangle, you gotta be brain-dead.)

The second love story is a lot more compelling. The angel Obadiah is assigned a new job by the archangel Gabriel: to pacify and negotiate with the Jansai. The Jansai are a people whose primary commerce used to be capturing and selling Edori slaves, and they are not happy with Gabriel’s new interdiction. But Obadiah is happy to accept this thorny commission because he’s more than half in love with Gabriel’s wife, and the assignment allows him distraction and distance from temptation. However, one of his wings is seriously injured on his way back from his first talk with the Jansai leader and he crash-lands in the middle of the desert. Luckily for him, a young Jansai girl, Rebekah, finds him on her way to get water for her family’s caravan.

Rebekah, like all other Jansai females, lives a life so sheltered it’s oppressive. It’s obvious that Shinn modeled the Jansai very closely to wacky fundamentalist Islamic regimes like the Taliban. Jansai women are required to keep all of themselves (including their faces) completely covered when not in the presence of immediate family, and are not allowed to go out in public unaccompanied by male relatives. Women found guilty of being “impure” are put to death. So Obadiah is completely out of Rebekah’s realm of experience, but she has a strong streak of independence to go with her compassion, and so their love story begins: she secretly helps nurse Obadiah back to health in defiance of everything she’s ever been taught, and they eventually become lovers when she returns home—quite the dangerous enterprise for both of them, especially Rebekah. How the two of them achieve their happily-ever-after is quite the suspenseful ride, but the resolution is very, very satisfying, if occasionally heart-stopping.

I really enjoyed this book. It is mostly character-driven, and Shinn does a good job with the people who populate the novel. I loved Obadiah when I first encountered him in Archangel, and I loved the opportunity to finally get into his head and see things from his point view. On the other hand, I found Rebekah and her wishy-washiness regarding Obadiah a little annoying at times, but then I realized that growing up as she did, her feelings about what she was doing and who she was doing it with could hardly be unequivocal. Elizabeth, however, was the character who grew and changed the most, and the transformation was very satisfying to see. She starts out as an unhappy, rather petulant woman who longs most of all for a life of luxurious idleness, and by the end of the book she has matured tremendously and manages to build true happiness from her circumstances.

Shinn also manages to present the angel-seekers with a lot of depth and sympathy. The seekers are generally treated with contempt by both people and angels, but Shinn convincingly shows us why many of these women are driven to do what they do, especially Elizabeth and her circle of friends.

I only have one small beef with the book, and it’s in the way Shinn writes about the Jansai. I know there are cultures that are based on oppression of the weak, and I can buy that these types of cultures don’t always produce the nicest people. I didn’t really have a problem with seeing many of the Jansai men being presented as greedy, brutish and selfish. But not only are they evil oppressors, they’re also FAT. And DIRTY. What the fuck? I think the dirty bit was what bothered me the most, because I grew up in a Muslim country (though I was raised Buddhist and am now officially agnostic), and I’ll tell you what: ritual purity and cleanliness are very important to most Muslim cultures. I would’ve appreciated a little bit more depth and balance to the portrayal of the Jansai; throwing in “fat and dirty” to add to their general villainy essentially pushed the race from being credible to being caricatures.

Anyway, if you enjoyed the previous Samaria novels, what are you waiting for? Go get it; this is one of the best so far. (But just to give you an idea of my tastes: Unlike most other readers, I found Archangel a bit underwhelming and really, really liked Jovah’s Angel.) If you’ve never tried Sharon Shinn and you like love stories set in other worlds, then check her out, she’s one of the best.

Notes:
The Samaria novels, in the order in which they were published:

Archangel
Jovah’s Angel
The Alleluia Files
Angelica
Angel-Seeker