Author: Eve Gaddy
Publisher: Belle Books
Rating: WARTY!
This author got on my good side in only the second paragraph when she wrote: "Brown hair, so dark it was almost black.". If you've read my reviews you'll realize that at times I've taken an author to task for writing something dumb like "black hair so black it was almost blue". It was nice not to see that here, but the novel still packed an awful lot of clichés and sadly formulaic writing, not least of which was the title. Last Shot? Barnes and Noble has three web pages of titles just like this, but I can't rate this positively because its biggest problem was positioning itself as a murder mystery when it's really just a tawdry romance.
I thought this was to be a murder mystery from the blurb, even as I realized that there would be romance "... and no matter how hot he is, she's not interested." I knew that was an outright lie! Della is obsessed with Studly Do-Right's body from the start - not his personality, not his integrity, not his decency, not his warmth, not his friendship, not his reliability, but his body from minute one, and she never lets it go, not for a minute. if a guy had been written with this same one-track mindset, the author would rightly have been pilloried for objectifying women. How is it any different here?
She's obsessing on his body non-stop despite witnessing a close friend get shot. Even when stud-muffin Nick is lying in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound after saving her life, she can't get her mind onto anything but his body. In short, Della Rose disgusted me every bit as much as a male character would if he were obsessing on a female in this same way, so why does Della get a bye for objectifying a guy? What, sauce for the goose is saucy for the gander? Is that it? I don't subscribe to that.
What makes this truly sad is that Della was an interesting character and this was a good set-up for a story. She's a single mom with a past. Her boss is shot. No one knows why. The Sheriff is dishonest, her only hope is a burned-out cop? How cool could that have been had it been handled properly, i.e. not put under the cookie cutter of trope romance?
Even her attraction to Nick wouldn't have been so bad had we not been treated to repeated descriptions of Nick's "beautifully rippling muscles" which really cheapened the story for me immensely. Can we not have a story about ordinary people? Do we have to dwell on buff carnality - which quite frankly destroys the artistry of romance with the caustic paint stripper of lust? I wish more authors would make the effort to grasp the crucial differences between the two. I could have liked Della and rooted for her, but after three chapters of her monotonously boundless lust, I was truly nauseated.
It only got worse when I realized that Eve Gaddy is yet another writer who doesn't know the difference between 'staunch' and 'stanch'. For me personally, I'm a staunch supporter of those who stanch blood running from open wounds. Too many writers are not!
I made it to page 75 in this story and it was just too boring and predictable to stay with it. There was nothing interesting going on, and the author was far more interested in rambling on and tediously on and endlessly on about how hot Della thought Nick looked and how hot he thought she looked. There was no mystery here, no thrills, no adventure, no danger. It was boring. I can't recommend this novel.
I have to issue a final warning on this, too. While this novel read fine in Adobe Digital Editions, and also in my Kindle, on my iPad, the novel read backwards. I am not kidding. It started on page 234 (or whatever the last page was - I forget), and to read it you had to swipe backwards to progress forwards through the novel, watching the page count go down instead of up! It was weird. I've never seen a novel do that before. I even downloaded it afresh, thinking it was just a bad download, but it wasn't. The iPad edition is screwed up.
