Berkley, chick lit/paranormal, June 2007 (mass-market edition)
Connections to: book 5 of the Undead/Queen Betsy series

As we all know, Betsy Taylor is the Queen of the Vampires. This book reminds us of that by having...absolutely bugger-all happen by way of a plot. As far as I can tell, there's a zombie in the attic, the European delegation comes to pay a begrudging homage to the new queen, Betsy's friend (whatever the hell her name is, I can't be bothered to look it up...I want to say Jessica? But I'm not sure and I really don't care) reveals she has cancer, and Betsy gets stuck with babysitting her little half-brother, the pooping machine, all the time.

All these elements are introduced, and then nothing is done with them. It was so annoying and frustrating to me as a reader. The zombie in the attic? Yeah, OK, so why was it there? Who sent it? I mean, what the hell? Why introduce something like that and then do nothing with it? The European delegation? Slightly more complex, but only so much as a pencil is more complex than a feather quill. There could have been so much more intrigue and mayhem there, but the thread just snapped and that was the end of that. And Betsy's extremely childish and selfish reaction to Jessica's (yeah, I'm gonna call her Jessica, even if that's not her name) news was so irritating that I just can't understand how Betsy even manages to have friends in the first place. There almost looked like there might be substance when Betsy was agonizing over whether to cure Jessica by turning her, but even that was nipped in the bud so quick that if you blinked you missed it. I know Sinclair was there, but I can't remember a bloody thing he did or said -- I'm sure it was along his usual lines of loving big, dumb Betsy despite the fact that she's big and dumb and he's so superior and blah, blah, bleah.

I read this book in less than a day. I know I laughed at some lines, but I was damned if I could remember what they were the second I closed the book. I'm sure I could have done something much more productive, or at least much more memorable, with those hours. I said when I read the last Betsy book that I would continue to read her as long as she amused me. Well, babe, this is goodbye.

1/2

Review © 2007 by Riley Merrick

St. Martin's Press, contemporary/romantic suspense, May 2007 (mass-market edition)

I never in a million years thought I would be unhappy with a Jennifer Crusie book. True, I wasn't nuts about Tell Me Lies, but when I go on my annual Crusie reading binge, I still read that book. I can't see myself re-reading Don't Look Down. I wanted to like this book so badly, but I just couldn't.

The plot is such a clusterfuck, to borrow the hero's favorite phrase, that I'm not even sure I can neatly sum it up, other than to say it's a farfetched mishmash involving a movie set, inexplicable stunts, the CIA, mafia bad guys, and you still won't understand it when you finish the damn book. From this reader's standpoint, the plot was very poorly executed. Maybe in proposal it looked good, but it definitely wasn't carried out clearly or coherently.

All the elements I have come to expect and love from Ms. Crusie were present: strong main characters with great dialogue, a precocious but non-annoying child, feminist pop culture, and comfort food. Those parts were great, but got lost amidst the aimless action plot. The cast of thousands, which usually works for Ms. Crusie, failed miserably here. Other than Lucy, JT, and Pepper, I neither understood nor cared about the motivations of the cast. Some scenes were amusing, like when Althea shows up in JT's bed, wanting to touch his gun, and when Mary Vanity explains that she took the mole job to buy bigger boobs to please Bryce, but a few scenes were not enough to save this book.

The bad guy goes from being presented as an aw-shucks-good-ole-boy con artist who cares about Lucy, Daisy, and Pepper to a strung-out batshit crazy psychopath. Maybe this is a good example of the perils of team writing: the former being Ms. Crusie's version of the character, and the latter being Mr. Mayer's. But whatever the reason, the disparate elements within the SAME PERSON just didn't gel and I got whiplash from being dragged back and forth.

And I'm STILL trying to work out the plot. When I finished reading it, my first thought was, "What the fuck just happened?" I had so many questions left unanswered: What exactly was Finnegan trying to do? What the hell did Nash really want? And what made him think that with Letsky dead he could even get whatever it was he wanted? What was up with Crawford? Who the hell was Tyler working for, and what the hell was the point in ending the book with him? Were Bryce and Althea in on things or not? I was annoyed, but at the same time, I really didn't care enough to go back and try to figure it out. When I can't bring myself to care about a book, that's a bad sign.

When I first heard that Ms. Crusie was team-writing with Mr. Mayer, I was ambivalent: leery b/c I knew nothing of Mr. Mayer's work, but also pleased b/c I'd missed Ms. Crusie so much. I thought getting a Crusie book in any form was better than no Crusie book at all. Now I'm not so sure that's true. In fact, I'm not even sure that I want to risk wasting my time on their next effort, Agnes and the Hitman.

Finally, a word on the mass-market edition, which has nothing to do with the authors and everything to do with the publishers. Physically, it's crap. I'm extremely careful with my books, so much so that even books I've read multiple times don't look like I've even touched them. This book looks like it went through a war zone. The cover was extremely flimsy -- the worst I've seen in a long time. Some of the text came close to running off the page. For the physical defects alone, this book was not worth $7.99. Publishers, if you're going to charge us poor readers more, make it worth our while, for cripes sake.

1/2

Review ©2007 by Riley Merrick