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

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. 

It’s 29 years after the events that ended One Man’s Love. Alisdair MacRae, eldest son of Ian and Leitis MacRae and a very successful ship captain, is visiting the ancestral MacRae lands that were abandoned when the clan decided to escape to Nova Scotia instead of suffering the full brunt of British rule in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden. He wants to look at Gilmuir Castle, which he’s heard so much about but never seen in person. But really, the visit is supposed to be a quick detour; he’s on his way south to London to talk to his father’s stepmother. When Ian MacRae (born Alec Landers, heir to the Earl of Sherbourne) decided to commit treason and aid the Scots in defying and eventually escaping the British, his stepmother, Patricia (who aided the escape) had him legally declared dead and her son installed as earl. However, her son is now dead, and Alisdair is presumed to be next in line to inherit. Alisdair has every intention of refusing the earldom. His life, he thinks, is with the sea and with a steady, sturdy woman in Nova Scotia.

Until he rescues a beautiful young woman named Iseabal. Iseabal is the only child of Magnus, laird of the MacRae’s age-old rivals, the Drummonds. The ruins of Gilmuir and the strange, sudden disappearance of the MacRae clan has always stirred her interest, and Iseabal uses every opportunity she has to escape there from the intensely abusive Magnus. Then one day, while exploring the castle, she quite literally falls down a hole. 30-year-old ruins that have been bombed to fuck and back by British cannon are full of holes—who knew? Not Iseabal, apparently. But conveniently enough, Alisdair is right there to yank her out.

Alisdair doesn’t really think too much of the encounter. Gilmuir and the MacRae land are actually foremost in his mind, especially when he sees the land being grazed over by sheep. He finds out that Magnus Drummond has been ceded the ownership and use of the property, and on impulse he heads over to the Drummond stronghold to buy the land back. Magnus is willing to sell it, on one condition: that Alisdair marry his daughter too. It’s not every day a man gets to marry a woman he pulls out of a hole, but fate has selected Alisdair for just such a destiny.

After the wedding, Alisdair and Iseabal and immediately sail for London, where Alisdair plans to annul the marriage and tell his step-grandmother gently but firmly: Thanks, but no thanks. But on the voyage down the two of them discover Things of Great Hotness about each other. For instance, Alisdair discovers that Iseabal is a sculptor, which he finds to be a turn-on. And Iseabal discovers that Alisdair has a genuine core of kindness and gentleness to him, and that’s a turn-on for her too, especially given her experiences with her father.

And Alisdair’s plans all go awry once he sets foot in London, of course. He doesn’t expect to like Patricia quite so much, for one. He also doesn’t expect the Sherbourne estate to be quite so prosperous. He suddenly realizes that if he accepts the earldom, he’ll have enough money to rebuild Gilmuir and start a shipyard there, and since the MacRae land has become a new obsession of his, he makes an old woman very happy and accepts the title. Similarly, his plans to annul his marriage to Iseabal are abandoned when Patricia, playing matchmaker, makes him aware of what exactly he’s giving up.

The happy couple sail back to Scotland to rebuild their future, except Magnus, as befits a romance novel villain (romances are not known for their multi-dimensional, believable bad guys—I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), has reneged on the deal and has reclaimed the land. And so begins a battle in earnest,and Iseabal feels herself horrified at the depths her father will sink to—so much so that she begins to doubt that Alisdair can truly love the daughter of the man who is able to commit such atrocities.

But they work it out in the end (I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), and everybody gets their just desserts. No, trust me. They do. There’s even a really sweet secondary love story involving Fergus, Leitis’s older brother and presumed dead at Culloden in the previous book.

Ranney does a good job of creating characters that aren’t quite your usual, run-of-the-mill romance novel archetypes. Alisdair strikes a nice balance between being confident and assertive on one hand, and being a genuinely nice guy on the other. Iseabal is one of the more interesting characters I’ve encountered lately. Her abuse at the hands of her father has led her to exercise extreme restraint over any outward manifestations of emotion, and her struggle with the repression is presented very believably. Alisdair’s desire and corresponding efforts to break through that restraint are similarly well-portrayed.

The writing style in this book is quite beautiful; it’s lyrical without being overwhelming. Ranney has a very distinct voice, and although I’ll read just about anything she releases, a few of her books have collapsed under the weight of her prose style (My Wicked Fantasy is one book that comes to mind, and Above All Others is actually almost completely unreadable because of it). Thankfully, she manages to avoid that particular pitfall in this book.

When the Laird Returns is a pretty entertaining book. It’s well-written, and it doesn’t insult your intelligence, though it comes close to calling it mean names a couple of times. Check it out. If you’ve read and enjoyed other Karen Ranney novels, look this up. If you’ve never read any Ranney, I suggest trying Upon a Wicked Time or My Beloved to get you hooked, those two books kick ass.

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

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love