Lightning Reviews are back! This Sunday, we have a book that made quite the impression in January’s Hide Your Wallet post with its carefully draped sheets, an awesome urban fantasy series that Carrie is totally digging, and a mystery with an FBI profiler heroine.
Big Rock
author: Lauren Blakely
Big Rock is a contemporary romance told entirely from the hero’s POV, which would be cool except his POV tends to be a little douchey.
Spencer Holiday has a big cock and he likes to talk about it–about its perfect length, girth, general shape, and ability to give orgasms. He’s a also playboy: his longest relationship was four months. Then his dad needs to sell his business to some people who are super about family values and Spencer has to pretend to be engaged to appease then. Why the hell the potential buyer would care who Spencer is sleeping with–especially since it’s his dad’s business not his–is a little confusing.
Anyway Spencer and his best friend/ business partner, Charlotte, pretend to be engaged. Of course they wind up having sex and falling in love.
I love the friends-to-lovers trope so that really worked for me. I also loved that Spencer wasn’t willing to risk his friendship with Charlotte by becoming physical, so she’s the one who pushes the sexual envelope, not him. I wasn’t crazy about Spencer in general though. Aside from the fact that he talks about his ten inch penis A LOT, he also professes to understand women and what they want. Then when Charlotte has actual emotions, he’s completely mystified and all, “I’m a dude! I need someone with ovaries to explain all these feels to me!”
Overall, the book is cute and it’s sexy, but the plot is a little contrived and Spencer can be frustrating. If we’d had Charlotte’s voice, I think it would have evened out the story a bit. The price is also pretty spendy for a book that’s 198 pages long. This might be a better library hold than a one-click buy.
– Elyse
Contemporary Romance, Humor, Romance
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Hunted
author: Elizabeth Heiter
I am very, very excited about The Profiler series by Elizabeth Heiter–a new series about a badass female FBI profiler? Yes, please!
The first book, Hunted, is a little rough in terms of the execution of the mystery but as the first book in a series, I’m willing to give it some latitude.
Our heroine is Evelyn Baine, a profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Evelyn is a woman of color working in a male dominated, predominately white workplace, and at times she feels as if she doesn’t fit in, though her coworkers don’t treat her differently. Evelyn’s race doesn’t play heavily in the book, but I wanted to mention it because I know heroines of color aren’t often found in suspense fiction.
Evelyn is assigned the case of the Bakersville Burier–a serial killer who murders women and buries them from the neck down. There is much creepiness and suspense here, so if you’re looking for a cozy mystery, this isn’t it. Evelyn is also covertly working on the case of a child abductor who kidnapped a childhood friend of hers. Honestly, that plot line held more appeal to me, but it’s the main focus of the second book, Vanished.
This book starts a little slow, but when the mystery really gets rolling about halfway through, the pacing picks up. There’s also the introduction of a romantic interest for Evelyn that plays out in later books. He’s a super hot member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Evelyn is adorably clueless about how much he’s crushing on her.
Overall Hunted is a pretty solid debut. The book wobbled a bit, but I was engaged enough to buy the next two books in the series.
– Elyse
Mystery/Thriller
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Midnight Taxi Tango
author: Daniel José Older
Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba series is my new crack. It’s similar to The Dresden Files in quality and tone, but it has a far more realistically diverse group of characters. The main character is Carlos, who is half-dead and half-alive due to being partially resurrected. Carlos lives, so to speak, in a version of Brooklyn that is populated with humans, ghosts, demons, magic practitioners, and, most terrifying of all, hipsters. He can converse with all groups with equal ease because of his “between worlds” state.
The first book in the series, Half-Resurrection Blues, was told from Carlos’s point of view. It set up the world, gave us a lot of action, and introduced an impressively tortured romance between Carlos and Sasha.
Another novel, Shadowshaper ( A | BN | K | G | AB ), is a young adult novel with new characters, set in the same world. (Sarah reviewed Shadowshaper when it came out.) We pick up Carlos’s story again in Midnight Taxi Tango. This book has chapters from the points of view of three characters: Carlos, Kia (a teenage girl who studies Capoeira), and Reza (a lesbian enforcer who works for a crime lord and who has a crush on a quirky and wonderful librarian).
This series is thrilling because it’s stunningly well crafted and intensely exciting. It’s also a thrilling series because of the range of characters. Carlos encounters male, female, straight, gay, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Hasidic, African-American, and Native American characters. The concept of New York City as a diverse place is central to the story, as are issues surrounding identity and culture.
Be aware that Midnight Taxi Tango is by far the most violent of the three books and also involves giant swarms of cockroaches. If you have issues with bugs, you’ll read this while holding the book in one hand and a can of Raid in the other. It’s not for the faint of heart, but fans of urban fantasy will find it to be immensely rewarding.
– Carrie S
Urban Fantasy
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That Big Rock cover makes me smirk: what is it with guys with heavy black beard stubble & hairless chests? I see that & I don’t think ‘oh baby’, I think ‘chest shaver’. Art directors are weird.
So glad to see you mention Older’s Bone Street Rumba stories. These are not cookie cutter paranormal novels. Older can write like a summbitch: dark and bizarre, yet with an underlying generosity, empathy and understanding of imperfect characters. The paranormal elements Older uses go beyond the standard ghost, vampire, were-cliches to become unique, and necessary threads in weaving the fabric of his world. There is a remarkable diversity of characters in these stories, but that diversity arises naturally from his New York setting. And those characters . . . Carlos and Sasha, Kia and Gio, Baba Eddie, Reza . . . become real people (with very unreal problems). Very highly recommended writer.
I also need to share my love for Daniel José Older’s books. I really appreciate the richness of the world he’s created, and how all of his books are set in that world, even if they’re not part of the same series–which will be perfect for young fans who read his YA and want more. He’s going to be Winning All the Prizes in a few years, I suspect.
Kobo has a 50% off sale ending today (use code JAN1650). Big Rock is eligible for the sale, as are Sourcebooks titles/authors such as Susanna Kearsley, Victoria Roberts, and Winston Graham (Poldark!)
You can sift through the sale here: https://store.kobobooks.com/Search?Query=&fcpromocodes=Yes&sort=Temperature
For me the issue with “Big Rock” isn’t Spencer’s POV (which I didn’t think was douche-y so much as it was identical to all other male-POV books, love ’em or hate ’em), it was the un-specialness and easiness of the story. I’m a fan of friends to lovers as well, but there’s no segue way here, no time spent on the shift. It’s she’s my best friend, we kiss, we have sex, we have more sex, we’re in love! It’s a quick read, it’s not awful, but if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Hell, if you’ve read this comment, you’ve read the book. The most unique and daring thing about this story is its title, for which I give the author and her designer (who she gives a shout out to in the acknowledgment) big props. It’s what made me buy.
Daniel José Older also has some free short stories from that world. Most of them read better after the books, but I think this one will hook beginners: “Kia and Gio”
I have to say, I totally agree with Elaine. I found Big Rock to be derivative. It’s a book that I read and one month from now, the only thing I’ll remember is that the cover designer managed to make an “R” look like a “C”. I’d give it a C-
OH YES YES YES for Older’s books. I adore them! Salsa Nocturna is a collection of short stories set in the Bone Street Rumba world, and is what convinced me I needed to read the books. (I hate zombies, and Carlos sounded like a zombie to me, so I hesitated.)