Rating: WORTHY!
This was an advance review copy and I was very grateful to the author and publisher for the chance to review it.
I loved the title of this - which can be read in two ways - but that's just me. I love the English language and I love playing with it. I wish more authors did! Anyway...Alice Samantha Riley spent her twenties in the British army and now in her mid-thirties, she's a bodyguard to Monica Cohen and her son Brando. Mr Benny Cohen, the seedy underworld boss, isn't around any more because Sam bumped him off and buried his body out in the woods, but now that it's been unearthed, the cops are trying to discover who did it. Sam is all about protecting her lover - Mrs Cohen - until she can settle up her late husband's criminal business affairs, and the two of them can move to Spain and retire together. At least she thinks that's the plan. She thinks wrong.
When other London mobsters start showing great interest in carving up dead Cohen's turf - and anyone who gets in the way of their plans - and Monica seems to have a male lover stashed away somewhere, Sam realizes that she has less of a sunny outlook than she does a murky pout-look (see I warned you!). Now a tall red-headed cop is on Sam's tail (and not in a good way), Monica has become vindictive, and Sam finds herself appointed temporary legal guardian of Brando, Benny's young, spoiled son. What else can jump the tracks? In this novel? Plenty!
The novel was written in first person PoV, which I detest, but some authors can carry it, and this one can. However, the tragic weakness of 1PoV was made crystal clear as the author found herself forced into jumping back and forth between voices and it made for really, truly clunky reading at times. If all of the third person sections had been excised, the story would have been much improved, but realistically the whole thing should have been in third person. That said, I liked the story overall, but if the artificial 'romance' had been omitted, it would have improved it greatly.
Frankly, I didn't get why a romance was needed at all in this story. The male interest (in whom I had a total lack of) had so little of a part in the novel, it was painfully obvious that his only purpose was to serve as the 'necessary male' in the female main character's life, and it was completely irrelevant and totally a waste of time. This is evidently deemed to be a requirement by far too many authors - this blind, headlong rush to 'validate' their female character with a male love interest - and quite honestly it's a bit sickening.
This story would have been excellent had this one character been eliminated (and of course he almost was, but purely for dramatic purposes), but having this man swoop-in to carry off the female felt like a complete betrayal of Sam, who was independent, strong and determined, and pretty awesome despite her shady behavior and poor decision-making skills, and who started out in a lesbian relationship. At one stage in the story, the male love (dis)interest pointedly tells us that a boy needs a dad. Well, he's entitled to his opinion, but I call a big BS on that one.
Having two parents is good idea because it's always smart to have more than one perspective to play into raising a child and to share the stress and work, but scores of single parents both male and female do sterling jobs, as do gay couples both male and female, so this felt like a betrayal of Sam. If she had to have a love interest, why couldn't it have been the female cop who was also in the story, and a lesbian? To be fair, Sam was bisexual, so her future partner was in no way cut-and-dried, but the trope "happy ending" was a misstep, I felt. Sam was fine on her own.
There was one other minor item, too, which is that at one point, a stolen laptop is offered in evidence. I doubt that this would be of any utility whatsoever except in furthering investigation. As evidence in itself, it seems to me that it was useless, because the chain of evidence was broken the minute it was stolen. The defense would have a field day with something like that, using it to cast doubt on every other piece of evidence, so I seriously doubt the police would be interested in it as evidence per se (not per say!).
That aside, the story was great, and if I ignore the "nomance", I have no problem rating this very positively. The story was engaging, interesting, and kept the reader off balance like it was a fairground cakewalk, because you never knew exactly what was coming next (except for the love interest where you knew exactly how it would play out). I recommend it as a worthy read.
