This is in the top 5 most hated books I've ever read, along with The Secret Lives of Bees and Night Embrace. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the heroine, who is stupid, incompetent, and unable to keep her pants on. I wouldn't mind that last part if it made any sense. She's a reluctant bounty hunter who's chasing down a cop-gone-bad that she happens to have slept with in high school (this is never explained). She is so totally mind-numbingly incompetent that she finds him over and over and every single time he humiliates her -- at one point he cuffs her naked to her shower curtain and then splits, another time he just snatches the keys from her and makes her search through a dumpster to get them back -- and then she proceeds to let him hang out at her apartment and eat pizza with her, while thinking about how sexy he is. Meanwhile the "bad guy" is a boxer who rapes and brutalizes women, and keeps threatening to break into her apartment and do the same to her. That'd sure put me in the mood for love.
I got immediately that the cop wasn't really a bad guy, that he was set up and that he and our heroine were going to end up together (not in this book, quite, but I assume in the rest of the books in the series that I WILL NOT BE READING). That didn't help it make any sense. I sure can't keep my hands off smug assholes who treat me like dirt and humiliate me for fun.
I wouldn't even have minded so much if she ever got some of her own back. So he handcuffs her naked in the shower; then next time they meet she better steal his pants and make him walk home naked, you know? But it never happens, because she is horrifically incompetent, in what I think is meant to be a cutesy touch to make me like her more.
Gross. Just horribly gross. I feel dirty for having read it.
Grade: F
originally posted 2006
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