Sometimes you pick up a book and it’s not even a little bit what you expected. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes you get Larry and his sweaty balls. If I had to sum up my reaction to this book in one sentence it would be “WTF did I even just read?”

I picked up His Hidden Agenda by Fiona Murphy because it was marketed as an erotic office romance with an alpha male hero, and I loved the cover. It promised all kinds of Elyse catnip. It delivered poor editing, flat characters, and scenes that made me goggle. Not Google–I don’t mind a little romance driven research–but goggle. As in, I was agog.

I feel compelled to warn you that the book is told in first person POV, present tense. For some people that’s nails on a chalkboard, but it doesn’t always bother me.

This book is about Alex, said alpha male, and Grace, our heroine and Alex’s competition for a promotion. At least, I think she’s Grace. Sometimes Alex inexplicably calls her Kate, the name of another Murphy heroine. So Grace/Kate and Alex are in the running for the same promotion in a marketing firm, and Grace/Kate hates sexy Alex because she feels like he’s given unfair advantage and takes credit for her ideas. In fact, she’s in her office seething after a meeting when Alex walks in and goes down on her.

Yes, I just typed that. I read that scene and thought “Holy shit, that escalated quickly.”

Alex and Grace/Kate do not have a previous sexual relationship. Based on the preceding chapter, Grace/Kate thinks he’s a giant pile of dog shit. Then he’s in her office all “I can smell your arousal” and giving her oral orgasms.

So we’re not spending a lot of time of development here. Well, okay. I’m alright with diving into the deep end of the pool. I’ve got my waterwings on.

From there the book progresses to Alex pursuing Grace/Kate and Grace/Kate being really insecure about it. As the blurb for the book states, Grace/Kate is a BBW. She spends a lot of time reflecting on her weight, on what size she is now, and what she size she used to be. I don’t mind a book with a heroine struggling with her self-image, and I don’t mind a book where the heroine is baffled that the ultra-sexy hero might want her either. I do mind what came next.

Grace/Kate is reflecting on the fact that she normally doesn’t enjoy sex:

Larry [her ex husband] had been much bigger than me and I hadn’t minded but he’d never tried to make me comfortable underneath him. He was also small at only about five inches and with his weight there were times he struggled to push in even more than a few inches. The first time had been painful and more work than I thought it was worth. I had tried after that but it just got worse. He’d demanded blow jobs but he didn’t wash well and after I actually was sick everywhere the first time he left me alone.

Holy shit. The heroine’s hang ups about sex are the result of dick cheese. Actual dick cheese, people. If someone had told me that one day, I’d read a book where dick cheese was a real conflict trigger, I’d have laughed in their face.

I lack the words to truly express how troubling that excerpt is to me. I mean, once my ears stopped ringing , my vision cleared, and the thought of Larry and his unwashed testicles receded enough that I was coherent again, I realized there are no fucking commas anywhere in that paragraph.

NO COMMAS PEOPLE. The entire book is infected with run-on sentences. Look, I get typos. I make them all the time. I find typos in my reviews. There’s probably a typo in this review. In one spectacular moment, I sent a company-wide email with the sign-off Retards, Elyse. It happens. The lack of commas, semi-colons–hell, periods–was endemic of a much larger problem.

I believe grammar rules are meant to be broken. I’m not a grammar nazi (which apparently is “comma fucker” in Finnish). I like my reviews to have a conversational tone, so I frequently employ sentence fragments to keep that tone going. The issue with His Hidden Agenda was that half the time I had no idea what the author was trying to say.

Take this sentence:

He’d demanded blow jobs but he didn’t wash well and after I actually was sick everywhere the first time he left me alone.

I get the nasty unwashed nuts parts just fine, but the second half of the sentence is confusing. I think she means the first time Larry left her alone she was literally, physically sick, but the phrasing is confusing and disjointed.

I tugged my waterwings on a little tighter and kept going. Basically from the dick cheese point, it didn’t get a lot better. Alex doggedly pursues Grace/Kate, and she marvels at him, and they go on a couple of dates.

Grace/Kate’s got a little depth because we know her ex was awful and she tells us her mother was hypercritical of her. Her insecurity makes sense. Alex, however, is just a cardboard standout of Prince Charming. He worships at Grace/Kate’s feet, stares at her adoringly, and has no role other than to boost her ego.

After their first date he takes her bed just to sleep because she’s too tired to withstand his smexing or some bullshit like that. After the second date they get it on and I can confirm that Alex’s wang was freshly scrubbed and probably smelled like a pine forest or something. In the throes of Grace/Kate worship Alex forgets to put on a condom during the encore round, and Grace/Kate is understandably freaked.

Then Alex says this:

I won’t be concerned about me. My concern will be about you. I know you feel like we’re moving fast but if you are pregnant, confirming it will be one of the happiest days of my life.

One of my waterwings just deflated and made that sad wheezing sound.

All we know about Alex is that Grace/Kate hated him because his business practices are slimey. Then he came into her office and found the little man in the boat, as it were. Then they go on two dates where he basically spends the whole time telling her how great she is, and now he wants her to carry his baby.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be chewing my arm off to get out of the situation ASAP. I mean, I almost expected him to throw out a line like “You’re face is so perfect I want to peel it off you and wear it like a mask SO WE CAN BE TOGETHER FOREVER.” Grace/Kate goes from a husband who can’t be bothered to scrub his junk to a lover who probably wants to weave a basket out of her hair.

Then Grace/Kate finds out that Alex was always going to get the promotion and their boss basically led her on to test her initiative or some shit like that. That’s so disgusting, patronizing, arguably sexist and WRONG that my hair started to catch fire, but Grace/Kate’s got a clean penis in her life now, so she doesn’t care. Once that incredibly troubling passage was glossed over, the next chapter opens with Four Months Later… and Grace/Kate applauding while Alex accepts his promotion and I was like, “Fuck it.”

The 40% of the book that I read felt like a cobbled together, poorly edited fantasy scenario. I don’t mean that romance novels aren’t a fantasy – they can be – but they usually feature fully developed people falling in love. Alex was such a shallow, poorly drawn out hero that he existed solely to cure Grace/Kate of her self-esteem issues and give her orgasms. He wasn’t a person.

Also give me some commas for Chrissakes. And some Dial soap for Larry.