I really wanted to like this book – the premise is fabulous. Aspiring Realtor™ working in the Neiman’s shoe department hooks up with some women who crash parties just about every night, mixing and mingling with Atlanta society, eating their body weight in Beluga and scamming their way into and out of haute couture, which they purchase from Neiman’s and return the next day. But aspiring Realtor’s™ boyfriend had gone missing along with her car, and here’s this hunkhunka hot hot rich-love giving her the eye and recognizing her through her party-crashing disguises. Now she’s digging for clues to her boyfriend’s disappearance while fending off the amorous advances of hotty mc rich-hot.

The shoe department alone caught my attention, even though my feet, they are dedicated and faithful lesbians in that they will only wear comfortable shoes. But I work in Manhattan; I’ve seen some thousand-dollar shoes walk by. There is nothing like the allure of couture shoes for some women, and it’s a fascinating world, just from the ankles down. But alas, the shoes are not a character in this story.

This could have been a book about reinventing oneself, only to appreciate the way one was at the start of the story. This could have been a book about a girl who lives a very vanilla life and gets a glimpse of the wild side by crashing elite parties and starts to come out of her shell. It also could have been a mystery about a boyfriend who’s gone missing and possibly stolen the heroine’s car, leaving her to wonder about his true character, while a much more attractive candidate for her affections pledges selflessly and somewhat suspiciously to help her, even as the police start to target her as their prime suspect.

Party Crashers tried to be all of these things, but in the end, I found the heroine, Jolie, to be so almighty boring that I couldn’t root for her, or even discern any real transformation in her character.

Jolie starts out a poor mouse of a woman: she just got fired from her job at a real estate agency and is working the holiday season at Neiman Marcus’ shoe department as she tries to set up her own brokerage. Her boyfriend had disappeared, as has her car – a coincidence that the police put together and presented as a possible theft on the part of said runaway boyfriend – and she’s a brittle, unhappy mess at the start of her story. She ends up spending the first day of her new job waiting on her superficial and possibly dishonest old boss, and running into a multibillionaire with a stack of shoeboxes as she heads for the storeroom. The old boss is predictably horrid, but the multibillionaire is struck by Jolie’s… well, I’m not sure what strikes him about Jolie in the first place. Maybe one of those Manolo’s was a really heavy mofo and smacked him into an altered reality.

Because Jolie, she is alternately insipid, clueless, willfull and then terrified, and utterly, utterly gullible. It’s hard to identify with or cheer for a character who decides to find out what happened to dear old boyfriend but then scares the crap out of herself at every turn, yet does little to figure out how to protect herself better.

So much happens to this woman, and she reacts with such terror much of the time that you wonder why she doesn’t crumple up in the middle of the action. I was so fascinated by the setting and the premise that I kept waiting for Jolie to come busting out of that plain-Jane shell and start kicking ass, but no. She remains as she is described on page 18:

[The mall was] a far cry from her own sheltered upbringing. She had been an only child, a change-of-life baby, and her frugal parents had harbored rather old-fashioned notions of child-rearing. But even if she hadn’t worn the most fashionable clothes or obtained her driver’s license until she was 18, she could thank her parents for loving her and for giving her a good value system. (Bond 18)

What…? Huh? Oh, sorry. I fell asleep transcribing the wonder that is Jolie. Bond hammers the point home with multiple references to the mess Jolie is in and how little she fits in that mess, such as: “How had she, a normal, hardworking good girl become enmeshed in a murder investigation?” (Bond 82) She’s a walking virtue, this Jolie.

Then comes her introduction to Carlotta, a sales woman in Neiman’s couture section. Carlotta is a full-time employee who has cultivated the attitude to keep the customers with intentions to buy involved in securing her attention, while scaring away the ones who are just browsing well out of their price range. Bond goes out of her way to make Jolie unassuming, quiet, and pure-heartedly friendly; why would someone as sophisticated as Carlotta be her friend? Carlotta is savvy, outgoing, clever, a seasoned makeup and wig artist, and she has perfected the art of party crashing. From printing up duplicate tickets to exclusive events to making sure she carries store-bought drink tickets to events that would otherwise require her to purchase them, Carlotta makes her way through Atlanta’s nightlife putting on a show, and hobnobbing with the rich and elite just for fun.

What’s odd about Carlotta is that she’s actually one of them – she’s from old money, though the reason for her pulling the wool over the eyes of people within her social stratus is beyond me, and beyond Jolie. It’s never really addressed, except in Jolie’s expansive ruminations.

My first thought upon reading Carlotta’s introduction into the story was that she was the villain, because I could think of no reason why someone as stylish and cultured as she would befriend someone like Jolie so instantly. But Carlotta does, and brings Jolie along under vague pretenses to a party at the High Museum, and gate crashes her way in with Jolie standing open-mouthed beside her.  Eventually Jolie relaxes and has fun, but afterward she’s not really able to talk about the experience to her friend Leann because “[s]he didn’t want to admit she’d been bamboozled into being bad.” (Bond 86)

The party crashing becomes the crux of Jolie’s moral dilemma, and she spends more time agonizing over that than she does over her decisions whether to tell the police about her suspicions regarding the missing boyfriend. Carlotta purchases couture formal wear and shoes for them from their respective departments, and teaches Jolie secrets as to how to return it all in pristine condition so they get a full refund. How Neiman’s doesn’t catch on to he high number of employee purchases and returns on their accounts is beyond me. Jolie has a horrible time managing her guilt over the swindling of this multibillion dollar department store, and makes occasional comments about how their behavior isn’t “right.” This bugged the ever living shit out of me because there were so many larger issues at hand, from missing, possibly dead boyfriend, to his car being fished out of the river with a dead chick in it, to finding herself in potential danger from either the boyfriend or someone else, and she’s fixated on whether her moral values can handle Carlotta’s purchase of some Manolo’s for the Museum party when she has every intention of returning them. It’s like watching a church burning down and wondering if using the holy water to put out some of the blaze would be a mortal or a venal sin.

Meanwhile, all the party crashing has brought Jolie into contact with some very interesting people, beginning with Carlotta, and expanding to include former business associates of her missing boyfriend, and the very eligible bachelor, Beck, who not only remembers her from being pummeled with a cascade of shoeboxes at Neiman’s while shopping with his sister, but recognizes her through a variety of disguises. Beck starts attending a lot of social events to catch sight of Jolie, though his fascination with her is really never adequately explained, even by Beck himself. He makes several attempts to do so, and each one comes out false and wooden, as if he’s saying the right words at the right moment so Jolie (or I, the reader) will believe his truehearted intentions.

For a romance, which I don’t know that this book really was, there was a complete lack of character development for the hero. Beck was as one-dimensional as many of the supporting characters. He was rich, his father owned a media empire, he was protective of his sister and he called in favors to keep Jolie’s increasing scandal out of the media as much as possible. Ok, great traits, but what about Jolie? He repeatedly tried to help her when she looked alarmed and close to tears about something, and he recognized her when even people who knew her well, such as her former boss, were fooled. When things got particularly hairy, he bailed her out by calling in more favors. He was a regular white knight in beat-up flipflops, with an altruistic heart and a bank account to make one swoon.

He’s hot. He’s rich. He’s disillusioned with the pretense of wealth. He thinks it’s hilarious that she crashes parties he’d rather not have to go to. He’s hot – and rich, did I mention? And he has about three or four modes, like those faces you can hang on your cubicle wall to tell the office, which is made up of people who don’t give a crap anyway, how you are feeling today. Beck is compassionate and concerned. Beck is horny. Beck is using his influence to help you. Beck is ardent.

The man had the emotional depth of an eggshell. He certainly didn’t make me swoon. I was curious how he had that effect on Jolie, because I found his instant concern for her, and the extremes that he went to protect her immediately after meeting her, a little conspicuous. He did take any emotional risks to be with her, and didn’t change or grow, except he bought more shoes as an excuse to see her again. But he wasn’t a hero equal to the heroine; he was a convenient hero. He was hot, he was rich, he was charming, and he was there.

However, I don’t envy Bond the task she set up for herself in this book. It’s not easy to write about a heroine who needs to be involved enough with the missing boyfriend to care about where he is, and yet have enough reservations about that relationship that she won’t beat herself with the Prada shoes when she realizes she has the hots for the new man in her life. She has to care enough to keep looking, but not care so much that she turns down Mr. Hotty McMeanttoBe.

It was almost at times as if she was searching for her brother, only with a lot less personal angst. Just as I never understood what was so interesting about Beck, I never understood what she saw in Gary, the missing dude. It had to be hard to balance Jolie’s affection for and desire to find out what happened to her boyfriend, while at the same time introducing a more appropriate love interest in her life. Gary was a big part of the mystery. Was he bad? Was he not so bad but mixed up with bad people? How did he end up with these people in the first place? And did he care about Jolie or was he using her? Was he kidnapped by aliens? Did he run off in a pair of high-heeled Via Spigas and wear his feet down to stubby ankle bones with the pain of it? How do women walk in those shoes, anyway?

There are a lot of dropped storylines, or false leads that didn’t add to the plot so much as confuse me as to why they were never developed. For example, Carlotta’s brother is mentioned at least a dozen times as the source of her party-crashing equipment, but the reader never meets him. Carlotta also has some problems of her own that are neatly tied up at the end, without ever showing any true angst on Carlotta’s part to indicate how severe or how superficial these problems were.

But by far the one part of this book that made me drop a whole letter grade was the sex scene. This was the most antiseptic sex scene ever. It was almost as if Beck turned to her with a gleam in his eye and a woody in his pants and said, “Female, do you wish to have sex relations?”

This was the essence of life: a magnificent man, and hormones run amok…. Determined to be more participatory than a hat, Jolie returned the favor with equal consideration, then after a few mental calculations regarding expansion, contraction, and overage, she straddled him in what proved to be a gradual yet successful maneuver.

I’m not sure what the goal was here, perhaps an allusion to her real estate career, but this was the height of the many, many times in the last 100 pages I asked, silently, “Are you kidding me?” Overage? It’s humpity humpy hump, not calculus.

By the time I finished reading this book – and it was a fast-paced read that took me about 2 days to and from NYC – I had folded the corner of so many pages of questionable plot twists, bizarre character development, and kooky dialogue that the book looked like it had shark teeth when I fanned it open.

I really wanted to like this book, because the idea of crashing elite parties and mixing with the guests just for the hell of it seemed so outlandish and fun – and the possibilities for romantic suspense in a setup where the main character is dressing up in couture shoes and fashions to sneak into these events are just endless. But a boring heroine, a facetless hero, and a few too many dropped storylines with herrings that weren’t so much red as they were grey, made the resolution to that adventurous start conclude in a bland and tasteless fashion.