Back in the day when I had a little less of a clue about how to choose a romance than I do now, I added a bunch of novels to my Books(not)Free queue based on how they scored on the Cover Controversy contest at LLB. I’m totally serious. I judged books by their covers, with this misguided sense that a publisher wouldn’t bother to put a solid cover on a book unless the contents inside justified the excellent art direction. Yeah, I know. Dumb as hell.

Most of the books I got out of this fit of superficiality were passable, though often bad,  but it did get me to think outside of my normal range of romantic reading to include some women’s fiction that targeted women older than myself, and featured some romantic elements. It also gave me a chance to read a black romance. I haven’t the foggiest idea why publishers force black romances into covers with cartoon figures on them, because nothing says ‘This book has two-dimensional, flat characters inside’ like a cartoon cover. Not the message I’d want to send, were I a publisher.

If You Dare features a non-cartoon cover, thankfully, and an art thief, Damien Black, who has just retired to Atlanta, where a scurrilous restaurateur has asked him to take on one more job. Not sure if he wants to trust the client, Damien visits the art museum where the heist is to take place, and meets the new director of the Atlanta Musuem, Angel Lafonte, who is smart, sophisticated, stunning, and the sister of Damien’s rather greasy, pushy potential client.

Angel is immediately knocked flat by Damien, and a puddle from a rainstorm, and he steals her cell phone and leaves her with his in order to ensure that he will see her again. Petty thievery and pickpocketing is a new technique in my experience of “ways the hero meets the heroine” plot devices, and instead of making Angel feel threatened and controlled, it causes her to up the stakes and steal something of his right back. A backbone she has, yes.

But only where the hero is concerned. Her sleazy brother has a tendency to treat her like an object — his object — and it’s more than creepy and gross. He has men following her, forcing her to dodge them in shopping malls, leaving her car at one entrance then hailing a cab from the other side of a crowded store. She tells him repeatedly to have his “goons” stop tailing her, but of course it continues.

He also has significant gambling debts, and has loan sharks after him, hence his pressuring Damien to take on one last job for him, a multi-million dollar heist from Angel’s art museum. Protecting his sister from himself is not something on darling brother’s mind, apparently, but woe be the man who gets near her while his goons are watching.

Meanwhile, a French cop, after Damien on the theory that he is le Phantome, a famous art thief who has eluded capture, has come to Atlanta, and begins following Damien wherever he can, tracking down his childhood friends and guardians, and generally shadowing Damien every step, regardless of what the Atlanta police think of his actions. Sadly, rental cars can’t keep up with Damien’s collection of sports cars, so Damien can lose him on the highway — so long as there’s no traffic.

Wait. I’ve been to Atlanta. How is this thief dude can zoom all over the city without getting stuck in traffic, while the minute I touch down I spend most of my time in Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams? So not fair. I want an art thief chauffer in a Maserati, next time I’m in Atlanta.

The romance in this book is tricky, since the forces working against the couple consist of her brother, and their own unwillingness to be fully forthright with each other, leaving her brother ample room to sabotage their romance by revealing all the things Damien has been hiding from Angel, such as the true nature and origin of his evident fortune.

As an aside: is it not a fantasy complete when one reads a romance with a spectacularly wealthy hero or heroine? I dig contemporaries with seriously wealthy individuals; it’s one thing when the hero is a construction worker or a pharmaceutical salesman. It’s quite another when the hero is a master at his craft and is fabulously successful and well off for his efforts.

My problems with this book are simple: one, there are serious holes in the story, and by the time you realize how the entire puzzle fits together, which I can’t reveal without entire blowing the ending, you feel cheated of the experience of knowing what the technicalities of the art thievery entail. For example, in Mission:Impossible, did you care about the preparatory work, the assignment, or the romance, or did you care about the hero descending from a wire into a room to type on a computer suspended in midair, evading notice from the security system? Is it not much cooler to check out how Charlie’s Angels jump across security beams and trip alarm systems than it is to see them sprawled on Charlie’s couch? Anyone see the movie “Sneakers” with Robert Redford? There’s one scene where his team heats a room up to 98.7 degrees so he can walk very slowly across it, evading both the heat sensors and the motion detectors, to steal something. It’s the best scene, and the ingenuity of the heist is half the fun. So to have an art thief as the hero, and not pay any attention to describing the thiefing that goes on is disappointing, to say the least.

Further, Angel as a character is a bit of an enigma. First, she’s a strong woman who has earned a position as a director of an art museum. She’s knowledgeable about several types and eras of paintings and sculptures, and she’s attractive and savvy, able to go up against a charming, suave and attractive man who swipes her cell phone from her purse and match him charm for charm.

But then she allows her brother to push her into dangerous situations, and never ceases to give him more rope of forgiveness and excuse with which to hang himself. She’s a classic enabler, which makes sense in that he is her family and she feels she should stand by him, but by the time she has realized he has placed her in significant personal danger, she’s forced to rely on others to get her out. Her brother owes significant amounts of money to a uber-villain named Merrick, and Merrick demands Angel as repayment: the opportunity to sleep with her. And her brother doesn’t say no. He begs Angel to go out with him, even knowing that Merrick is dangerous, certainly homicidal, and not above raping her should she say no to giving him what he truly wants.

Even then, she refuses to give her brother the assing he truly deserves. If a sibling offered me up like that, I’d come seriously close to doing them lethal harm. Yet his actions have no satisfying consequences, and as a reader, seeing the villain figure be told his penalty is to have his sister cut him from her life, when she wasn’t all that pleased to have him there in the first place, is disappointing and irritating, especially when you want to root for such an otherwise brave and clever woman.