Rating: WARTY!
I got this freebie which offers sample chapters of a bunch of "romance" novels - that sort of thing I never read, so I decided to take a look at this limited sample - each book had only an opening chapter or two - and to see if they were truly as bad as I think they are. It turns out - they are! Who knew? I decided to review these based solely on the sample chapters, which believe me is more than enough to judge this trash. None of these books would remotely pass the Bechdel-Wallace test because they can't even pass it within one female character's own head! It's all about guys and sex all the time and some might argue that this is okay because that's the whole purpose of the book, but I'd argue that people who say that sort of thing are missing the point - and by some serious margin, too. Actually it's not even a margin, it's more like a burgeon.
Kate Summers is a privates investigator with a tragic past (which PI doesn't have one?!). She's also a dom who is - surprise! - forced to go undercover as a submissive - and she likes it. Ri-ight. Not only is her story suspect, her dom is her suspect. In other works the whole thing is messed up.
Another problem here is this author's antiquity - and I'm not talking about her chronological age, which is irrelevant, I'm talking about her antique view of life. She starts out her story in the inevitable first person because god forbid there should ever be a private dick story in third person. The world would end! So she's rambling on about hunting men during the day - like women never commit crimes. She insists that she delivers "men to justice one criminal at a time". Sexist pap.
As if that's not bad enough she gets a couple coming into her office with a crime to solve, and these are the same people who got her fired from the police force. So they're villains, get it? How do we know they're villains? Well, they're overweight! Yep! Jewels encircled "her fat neck" and "His fat jowls shifted to and fro". Fat=villainy. That's when I quit reading this trash. I didn't even need a whole sample chapter. WARTY. Case closed.
