Title: Maverick
Author: Lora Leigh
Publication Info: St. Martin's 2009
ISBN: 0312945809
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Every night before bed this week I’ve read a few pages of Lora Leigh’s Maverick. I picked it up partly because I know for many readers, her books are Teh Cracke, and because she’s a huge seller in contemporary erotic romance. Plus there’s SEALs and muscular badasses with semi-automatic weaponry in their trousers, plus an actual firearm if they’re carrying, and I’m a total fangirl of law enforcement characters of both genders.
The problem with Maverick is that I read a few pages and bust out laughing – not “Ha ha! That was hilarious dialogue!” laughter but “Wait, are you kidding me?” laughter. I’ve already got more dogeared pages than I know what to do with.
The best section by far is this one:
“She’s wounded, man. You can’t show her the killer face and expect her to trust you.”
Micah turned to look at him now. “The killer face?” he asked evenly.
“Yeah, that icy Mossad façade you’re wearing right now,” he growled.
Seriously. “Mossad façade?!”
And it’s not even a joke! I mean, not that I can tell anyway because the wearer of this alleged Mossad Façade doesn’t see the humor in it. And the speaker wasn’t kidding, either. He was growling. And really, can you growl about a façade?
After I stopped giggling, I had to admit, there’s a real potential for a series here. Not the covert operative collective that’s been done over and over since the turgid peaking of the erotic romance cum romantic suspense genre, but a series built on potential variations of “Mossad Façade.” Leigh is sitting on a gold mine here.
For example:
Navy SEAL appeal. Muscles, sleek wet hair, and fighting of pirates with his mighty mizzen mast.
Marine sheen. Is it Vitalis, or is it vitality? Only Intrepidde Heroinne knows for sure!
Coast Guard petard (as in hoisted by) You always want a man who knows his way around an inlet.
Army Charm! An army of one – to get in her pants!
Air Force horse! – Duh. Hung like one.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Oh, come on. Fish in a barrel for law enforcement based erotic romance.
It’s like “Dancing with the Stars” only instead of stars we have hypertrophied men in serious-faced dance routines. I’ll keep trying to read past this page but when the comedic hijinks of my imagination start with the Rockette-style choreography of the Mossad Façade in a dance-off with the smooth rhythm of the Marine Sheen, it’s hard to get back into a story where already I suspect the heroes take themselves too seriously.
Sadly, it doesn’t get much better for me.
Risa Clay, the heroine, is a character, I believe, from an earlier novel who survived hell: she was kidnapped and drugged with some sort of psychosis-inducing sexual stimulation drug, then raped. She was 13 at the time. Her father organized the whole thing. Now it’s several years later, and she’s all grown up, and trying bit by bit to undo the damage.
Maverick, or Micah, has been ordered to tail her, and, irritating as it is for Micah and his façade, her tail is turning his tail on in a big, big way. Faster than you can say “Oy gevalt,” Micah has a boner of a conflict. Risa has been targeted by a mysterious assassin who goes by the name “Orion,” and Micah has a personal interest in both protecting Risa and killing Orion: Orion killed Micah’s mother.
Most of these plot elements I would expect to combine and hold my interest, but the execution (no pun intended) leaves me distinctly not curious. There’s a lot of long paragraphs of rumination, and repeated details of backstory in the internal monologue of the characters, plus a lot of redundant phrasing. All the victims were “pumped full” of the drug that was given to Risa, and the same few words are used over and over to describe the drug itself. It was like reading the same intermediary paragraphs between small sections of dialogue.
Then it just got looney tunes all up in there. Risa has decided she is going to get her groove on and “take a lover” – her first, since prior to being raped, she’d never had sex. So the Elite Ops tail her to a club, and – surprise?! – everyone from the Elite Ops team is here. It’s like those reunions of all the historical romance family members in collective wedded bliss only instead there’s a crew of badass operatives and their wives/girlfriends/fiancees, all hanging around this club to meet up with Risa, dance with her, protect her from assassin dude, and I presume help her on her way to nookie-lation.
At one point, a character speaks into a microphone attached to his wrist. Sure, that’s not obvious, some dude chatting into his shirt cuff. Then, Micah and Risa make steamy, electric eye contact:
He stroked the delicate line of her jaw with his gaze, then came back to her eyes. He let her inside him, let her see into the soul and the parts of him that were just a man, just a lover willing to touch her in gentleness. He let her see there was nothing to fear if she let him close to her.
Eyes were more than the windows to the soul. They could lie as well. And Micah was a consummate liar. But as he stared into her wary gaze, he found himself wishing he could be more.
Dude. Does his semi-automatic weapon convert into an acoustic guitar so he can start playing love ballads about rainbows and trout fishing? Because Holy Emo Are You Kidding Me?
Then I began to doubt the brain power of the entire Ops team. The dancing team from Elite Ops figure out that Risa was followed, and they presume by Orion or someone he hired. Micah does not take the news well:
He did breathe in heavily. “Have a crew go into her apartment before she returns home, check for bugs. Orion will lay in listening devices sometimes, to track his mark. Several were found in his last victim’s hotel room. That’s how he knows where to strike and when. Make certain her apartment is clean.”
“That could give us away,” Clint pointed out. “He’ll know we’re on to him and he could run.”
Micah shook his head. “He’s been tracked before and escaped. He’s a master at his craft and the execution of it. He’ll know I’m her protection, there’s no hiding that. Orion will see it as a challenge, but he won’t back off. Nothing will stop him from attempting to kill her.”
He and his father had found the devices in Micah’s parents’ home when his mother had turned up missing. How long they had been there, Micah wasn’t certain. Definitely long enough for Orion to have tracked her schedule and to know where and when to take her.
Hold the phone here. Micah knows of at least two other instances where Orion had targeted someone, including his own mother, wherein Orion had placed bugs in the target’s home to verify schedule and times of vulnerability… and it’s just now occurring to him that maybe Risa’s home should be scanned?
Dude. I know there are few people in the Mossad that are that freaking dense, if any. I mean, come on now. If she’s targeted for assassination, how on earth are the whole muscular posse of them at a club, and not combing her home for bugs, setting up a safe location for her, and generally, you know, doing something other than gazing through a façade with eyes that are the window to lies?
Once I realized that I couldn’t trust this bozo to do much of anything besides gaze and smolder and clench his jaw, I didn’t want to read any more. Time to find another book to put on the bedstand.
Next time I meet an actual Mossad agent, I’m going to compliment him or her on having such an excellent façade.
“Mossad Façade.” You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Hahahaha!!!!! Ah, MaryKate, that’s great. And true. Oy…
Mossad Facade In Ur Ass!
making97: I might actually be able to make 97 variations of In Ur Ass!
In Ur Ass, Knowing Yr Soul
OMG, This review and the following comments are beyond hysterical. Thank you for making my Monday into a laugh attack.
I don’t think I’m ever going to get over the line “assasins are in the house, let’s fuck!”
Jess Scott
http://www.jessicascott.net
JenD:
Or as my daughter theatrically proclaims whenever she has to chop the little bulbs for dinner:
Away, Onions of Evil!
[vw: until76: I will not pick up another LL novel until I am at least 76]
Don’t despair, Micah – yr namesake in Heroes is one of the few characters I can still stand. And, as a bonus, at any minute ATM machines may suddenly start dumping cash into your hands, wheras the only super power I get is to be tortured at the prom.
LOVE the in yr ass lines and the menacing power of the evil Onion! I know the satrical paper by that name can be harsh, but surely it’s not THAT terrifying!
I quit reading Lora Leigh several “Seals” ago. I quit her “Breeds” also. She is a guilty pleasure, but I think she’s run her course…….of course!
money44: Forty-four reasons she’s doing it for the money!
ATM machines dumping cash into my hands? I’d rather like that, I could really use the money. Thanks, recession!
Good to hear people like the name despite the literary atrocities that have been done to it. 🙂
Anthea: Hah! Never been much of a cowboy, sadly – people look at you funny if you wear cowboy hats when you’re coding.
Nifty: Please, please tell me that’s an actual line. Please.
OMG, you guys have to quit!! I’m laughing so hard I’m going to be doing my own leaking and dripping when I pee my pants.
I have not read any of LL other than the Breeds books and only a couple of those. And yes, to qoute Nifty, they all had the “soul-bonding anal sex” in them. I though one character, ok – after the second and third book had the same formulaic sexcapades, I called it quits.
This is the main reason that I never even made it through the first one. I don’t expect a documentary, but why in the world did she set a book about SEALs in Atlanta? There is no logical reason for that. As I’ve said before, these books flipped my “scoff” switch to the permanent on position and that’s just not fun for me.
I read a couple of the Men of August books and felt like I needed a shower with lots of soap, so I gave up on those too. Lara Leigh is just not for me.
(not the Lori from earlier in the thread, the other one)
You know if it were just the ‘buttsecks makes us soulmate’ stuff that would be bad enough, but what really squicks me is that bit about ‘our daddy was so mean to us, we now are sexual deviants who have to share our women/girlfriends/wives with our brothers’ (either blood or SEAL buddies). I know we aren’t supposed to extrapolate from the written word to the author, but I just can’t help but wonder about LL cause that seems to be a theme of hers…
Anticipating a time when global warming raises the sea level to catastrophic proportions?
(Strangely enough, the comments are almost enough to make me try LL again, even though I know I’ve tried one of her books before—can’t remember which one—and didn’t like it or finish it.)
Lora Leigh – meet Santorum. Santorum – meet Lora Leigh. I bet you two have a lot to talk about.
@GrowleyCub:
I don’t know about that….maybe most authors, but I had some definite suspicons about VC Andrews, based solely on the themes going on in her books…
court33: I need 33 days on non stop courting before I’ll let a guy have buttsecks.
LOL!
I still enjoy her breed series. I have to agree with everyone though, I wish the ass jabbing would stop. Her last breed book had that going on. I can’t remember the previous one to that.
Mo
One of my professors is a former SEAL and I now have this urge to ask him if the teams have some sort of alternate base set up for just such an emergency. I won’t actually do it, even though he would probably think it was funny, because I do not want to find myself explaining Lora Leigh to him.
I’m really not sure whether it’s me or LL – but I just can’t enjoy her books anymore. They’re just too over the top, so I’ve given up on her.
You know how we sometimes say that some super-alpha hero behaviour IRL it would be stalking but it’s okay in a romance novel? In her books I actually think its stalking (insert other verb as appropriate here).
The dialogue is too much and I’m a bit sick of the buttsecks and enough with the dripping…
I did love this one though
thanks Gail!
What I loved was how he’s SO TUFF he doesn’t even Know when he’s being TUFF- it’s PART OF HIS SOUL NOW.
A number of years ago I got some of her books from Ellora’s- it was pretty early on because Breeds was up to about book 4. I went through the ‘god, they squick me out but I Can’t Stop Reading Them’ phase, into ‘Wait, she’s just writing the same book over and over again, through ‘I beat you CAN’T have mmf or mmmf without the guys touching each other at least a bit, why don’t they ever get it on?’ and rapidly into skimming through borrowed copies until I satisfied myself that no they weren’t ever going to get any better and I had found other authors who got me hot without making me feel a bit ashamed of myself.
That was the most hilarious review I think I’ve ever read, and in part not even because of Sarah’s wit, but the actual text of the novel.
Seriously: Rolling on the floor laughing my ever-lovin’ ass off.
Thank you, Sarah. That was marvelous. *G*
Lora Leigh is one of those authors I like better from her Ellora’s Cave days than what she has going on with the trad press. I can’t help but feel like the fun part about reading her was what would she do next and where would she go with it. Which was pretty wild on EC but not so much now.
Okay, I am really loving all the comments. I have to say that I broke up with Lora Leigh during the Men of August. I still feel dirty after all this time. I think got back together with her during the Breeds, because it was different. I broke up with her again because the Breeds heroines were all STUPID as HELL and to intrepid or vapid for my taste. I think I tried again with this covert ops/military series and OMG! Why do I waste my time? Every single book is full of angst (hero), sex (everyone) and more angst. I think I would trust my crack head brother to protect me before I would one of these guys.
Teddypig: you definitely have a point. The only exception I would point out is the Bound Hearts series. The EC Bound Hearts books were good, if thin. When they went mainstream, she was really able to flesh out the plots. However, the last one, “Only Pleasure”, was meh. So, maybe, your theory is showing itself in the Bound Hearts series now. le sigh.
In Ur Ass, Knowing Yr Soul
ROFLMAO!!!
I have to say that you that is too funny! And everyone is correct. Its like they have to have the buttsecks in order to know if they are right for each other. “If it don’t fit…..”
The Men of August. I had 2 of the 3 books and made it half way thru 1 book and had to stop. That was the sickest, most disgusting drivel I have ever had the misfortune of reading and months later I still get mad just thinking about it.
While not a huge fan of her bound hearts, I bought Only Pleasure. It got an F- on my blog. How can anyone get past the what those Trojans did at the beginning? Besides, every time I see The Trojans Club I keep getting images of giant walking condoms. Ribbed and lubricated – for anal sex.
PS-No one should be surprised she has SEALs in Atlanta and they belong to a private BDSM club where the annual dues is more than they earn (and they’re well known Dom’s), LL does not know where the hymen is either. Unlike SEALs, I assumed she had one of those at one time. Then again – the way to a woman’s soul is up her ass. Maybe she’ll start a new religion, like Ron Hubbard, where you find redemption thru anal sex. Guess it beats the wafer and the wine.
It starts becoming so obvious that they are writing their own kinks when it turns out that all their characters end up wanting the same thing. All LL’s women want double penetration, all Ann Jacobs’ women are really subs at heart…
I had my suspicions too. All that incest…
As for LL, I think she got popular because of her anal scenes. More readers like the butt-sex more than they would care to admit. I liked Maverick, it was much better than another of hers that I tried to read recently.
I really liked her Men of August titles, they didn’t squick me out one bit.
I ‘m going to admit I like her Breed series. I tend to skim the overdone sex parts I just want to know what happens to the last of the original guys. I think I’m going for 2 more and that’s it.
M
I read Dangerous Games and part of one of the Breed series and honestly, found them just ludicrous. I just have a huge disconnect with a guy who is supposed to be a manly-man who carries around a gym bag full of ball gags and butt plugs. I mean I’ve known a fair number of true alpha-male types and none of them have needed all that hardware to get it up or keep it up. LL’s men just come across to me as really weird and creepy.
Wait! Butt-secks isn’t kosher. I read that is Leviticus! I don’t think Micah is a very nice Jewish boy.
My second thought is with dialog and plots that bad it really isn’t a surprise that print media is going extinct.
I admit to not knowing a huge whole lots about Special Teams, but don’t they usually either inflitrate the USA’s overseas enemies or shoot up terrorists? I don’t think normal civilian types get SEALS as bodyguards no matter how endangered they are. Would that be the police or FBI’s job?
@mirain: Yes. Unless they have a direct order from the president it’s illegal for the military, including Special Ops, to operate on US soil for any reason.
Look at it this way, it’s at least possible that they could have the presidential directive which makes that part less dumb than the fact that they live in Atlanta