This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by MsCellanie. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.

Here is MsCellanie's review:

The members of the Gray family are the owners and operators of Espresso Cosmetics. The late Mrs. Gray founded the company; her widower and children now run it. This is Lola’s story. She’s the youngest of the family. Her siblings are the company’s C-level executives; she’s been the spokesmodel for the company since her teens (she’s now in her 20s).

She is not a very good spokesmodel. People who see her ads think she’s a sexagenarian and advertising denture cream. But apparently despite at least a decade of horrible marketing and makeup that adds forty years to your face, Espresso is doing wonders and making the family members multi-millionaires. (It doesn’t make sense in the book, either). Her money and position have turned her into a spoiled brat who gets an inordinate amount of negative press for a makeup model.

At the start of the book, the company decides to get a new spokesmodel because Lola sucks at her job. Luckily, she gets a shot at a different job in New York and decides to drive from Nashville to Manhattan for the interview process. For some reason that makes little geographic sense, she ends up in a small town in Ohio. There, through silly plot machinations, she meets and falls in instalust with the hero.

The hero, Dylan, is a small town cop who left the big city to act patronizingly toward his mother at close range rather than from a distance. He falls in instalust with Lola (she’s an amazingly beautiful 20-something who looks 60). Together, Lola & Dylan decide to screw police procedure, rules of evidence, and each other because of their deep connection.

I really didn’t like this book from the beginning. The opening scene with characters from the previous books in the series had some troubling gender dynamics and gay-panic “jokes,” which was not a good start. After that, well, have you seen the commercial where one person says in frustration “That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!”? That’s how I felt the rest of the way through the entire book. The story pretty much failed to get a large number of things right including (but not limited to), corporations, marketing, GPS, paparazzi, Pilates, social media, entertainment journalism, police work, small towns, and the legal system.

With great writing, I’d probably overlook a few issues. But there were just so many problems and the writing in my opinion wasn’t very good, much less good enough to overcome all of them. There were a lot of weird turns of phrase. With the exception of the heroine, every character regardless of age, gender, or profession had the same voice (it was especially noticeable when the speaker was a child). The narration also has this odd habit of almost, but not quite, making pop culture references that I found really off-putting (For example, “Some even compared him to the bumbling deputy from a classic black-and-white television show” instead of just, “Barney Fife”).

I think I was supposed to find the heroine feisty and independent, but to me, she came across as childish, petulant, and unlikeable. I found the hero condescending and self-righteous. I didn’t particularly care about any of the other characters either.

I wouldn’t recommend the book, but it isn’t offensively awful. It’s just not good. From me, it gets a “C.”