Riley Merrick’s Thirteen Wallbangers



1. Strange Attractions, Emma Holly: because Holly is my favorite erotic romance author, this book was a bitter disappointment. The physics and the weird architecture took away from the actual story – although considering the actual story featured a heroine dumb enough to give herself in sexual slavery to two men who had been STALKING her, maybe that’s a good thing?
2. A Season Beyond a Kiss, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss: why Woodiwiss decided she needed to turn the novella she wrote into a full-blown novel, I have no idea.
3. Fool for Love, Eloisa James: After the sparkling charm of Duchess in Love, this clunker annoyed me to no end.
4. Lord Perfect, Loretta Chase: another disappointment coming on the heels of a well-liked prior book. Did any book stand a chance after Mr. Impossible? Yes, but not this one. Whiney bratty kids and a prudish prig of a so-called hero. Ugh.
5. Open Season, Linda Howard: featuring THE dumbest librarian on the planet. This book literally did leave a dent in my wall.
6. Heather’s Gift, Lora Leigh: just when I thought the premise for Strange Attractions was the dumbest thing I’d ever read, along comes Mary Sue Heather to “save” the last of three brothers through incestuous orgy. And oh yeah, she’s a crack security specialist, dontcha know – well, you don’t know, b/c she’s never seen doing anything other than angsting over her man or coming.
7. The Corset Diaries, Katie MacAlister: how is it that MacAlister can dream up such good concepts (heroine on reality show where people have to live like Victorians) and screw them up so badly with her godawful characters? This one was the biggest babbler of all her heroines I’ve met – she even babbled while the hero was going down on her. Egad. STFU, already.
8. Then Comes Marriage, Christie Ridgway: I really do seem to have bad luck with sequels to first books I really liked. This one had one of the most trumped-up excuses to get married I’ve ever seen.
9. This Perfect Kiss, Christie Ridgway: the only author to make my list twice, which means I don’t buy her books anymore. Who trades work for sex in a contemporary story? Never bought the idea, never bought the HEA b/c the “hero” spent the entire book making the heroine feel like she was beneath him.
10. Passionate Realities, Nicole Austin: sure, the book had lots of hawt secks, but the more I think about the Mary Sue-ness, the awkward writing whenever sex wasn’t involved, the put-down to the romance genre, the age/achievement gap, and the logic of the ending, the more it insults me.
11. Take your pick of any Christine Feehan book. I think the only story of hers I liked was the leopard shifter novella. Her Carpathian barbarians and their forced seductions, not to mention all the plot holes, are just not my cuppa. And it’s not like I didn’t give her a chance; I read 4-5 of the things. That’s time I want back.
12. Blue Smoke, Nora Roberts: the family interactions kept this from being a total wallbanger, but the heroine’s lack of ability to see that every man she was involved in died or was injured by fire was so frustrating to me as a reader that I had to include it on this list.
13. The Aeneid, Virgil: yes, a school book. I had to read this cheap-ass knockoff of The Odyssey not once, but twice, and I had 2-page syndrome both times. The second time I had to read it, I had an amusing anecdote to share with my “blood lust”-obsessed professor, courtesy of the first professor, who was a classics expert. She had told us that legend has it Virgil hated The Aeneid and ordered it destroyed on his deathbed, since he wasn't going to have the time to do re-writes, but Emperor Augustus it wouldn’t hear of it. Prof #2 said to me, “So?” and I replied, “They should have listened to Virgil.” The look on her face was priceless.



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