I knew this novel was not for me when I read, "He was actually quite handsome, Maggie realized with surprise." What I realized with no surprise is that it was actually quite the contrary: it's entirely predictable that this single woman would meet a guy - two in fact, each better than the last - so no. No surprise at all. Not in a novel like this, written by a female author who seems to think a woman needs to be validated by a man in every novel she writes.
No, that's not my invention, it's apparently the view of the book description writer who predictably gets it wrong: "Maggie Newberry is sheltered, privileged but also a whip-smart" No, she isn't! Would a whip-smart person hand over €30,000 to a man she just met and has never seen, without - at the very least - asking for some sort of ID and a receipt?
Nope! "Whip-smart" just hands it over, no questions asked. "Fast on her feet" is a complete misdirection since the story moves with a glacial pace. But that she's "a little stunned to realize that she's 34 years old and still hasn't found 'the one' " is what supports my contention above. Maggie is a desperate woman created by yet another female author who thinks every woman needs a man to validate her.
The story is that Maggie's "long-missing sister" Elise turns up dead in France, apparently shot in the head and dumped into water. Maggie is tasked with going to identify the body and also to take the money to pay off this shady guy who claims he can kidnap Elise's daughter, Maggie's niece, from her father and get her into the USA on a fake passport, and Maggie has no issue whatsoever with any of this. She has zero thought for the child's welfare or what's actually best for her niece. Instead, she takes her cue entirely from these shady guys she's only just met.
I didn't like Maggie from the very start, or how she was introduced in a tedious info-dump. And how she explained - to the French officials at customs - all that money is glossed over. Just like the Americans, the French take an interest in anything over ten thousand currency units. How did Maggie get that amount of money so quickly? Yes, it was from her father, but if she didn't take it with her, then how did she get that much from a French bank at short notice? If she did take it with her, how did her father lay his hands on that much cash at short notice? No explanation is offered.
I understood even less why the author set the novel in France and then proceeded to diss French men! Main character Maggie is predictably paired with a guy who's described as "Broad chested and tall, he was easily six foot four which was unusual for a Frenchman." This is horseshit. The average Frenchman is taller than the average American and right on par, to within an inch or so, of every other male in the western world. The French men's basketball team in the 2021 Olympics, for example, was two inches taller than the US team on average. So no, a six foot four male in France isn't unusual, jackass.
For an author who is supposedly a Francophile, you'd think she'd know this. You'd think she'd know about France. You'd think she'd know French. That this is a "TOTALLY NEW AND REVISED EDITION!" suggests it required work even after it was first published, but rest assured, it still needs work. My question here though, is: why did it need to be totally new and revised? What was wrong with it before? And why was it published in that condition?
Why Maggie has to go and identify a corpse that's bloated beyond recognition from submersion in water, when the DNA has already been confirmed is also a mystery, but a bigger mystery is how did they obtain the DNA sample against which the corpse's DNA was verified? And how were they able to do it so quickly? Again, the author says not a word about that. So by this point, barely into the story at all, I was already tired of the clichéd writing and the poor plotting and I detested the main character, so there was no point whatsoever in reading on. This novel sucks shit like a starving fly, and I sure as hell have no intention whatsoever of reading a whole series about this dickhead. Slap a Newber(r)y on it! LOL!
