I'm currently having a mixed reaction to Janelle Denison's latest erotic romance, Wilde Thing.
The heroine owns a coffee shop and hires the hero, a private investigator, to find her missing cousin. Naturally, said missing cousin was employed as a phone sex operator and heroine decides to go undercover. Both hero and heroine are warm for each other's forms - so there's been a lot of nookie in the first 100 pages alone.
OK, so what's my problem? There's just too much sex, way too soon. The hero practically leers at the heroine and makes a lewd suggestion after their first ever conversation with each other. Like a couple of guys I knew in college - this book lacks any sort of foreplay. Would it have killed the author and her publisher to tack on at least one chapter showing the characters tap dancing around each other? Since the book doesn't even clock in at 300 pages - I think not.
Also, the hero has this whole "bad boy" thing going on. Maybe I'm a bit odd here, but I was never one of those girls with weakness for bad boys. Sure they're fun to drool over, but I always end up picturing my father sitting on the front stoop with a loaded shot gun. That image tends to kill a lot of fantasies.
Denison can write steam - I'll give her that. And unlike a lot of erotic romance - the characters aren't completely miserable and unlikeable. I can see the author already trying to soften up our bad boy - and the heroine isn't completely brain dead.
All in all - it's firmly sitting in middle-of-the-road territory at page 100.
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