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Monday, August 30, 2021

Review: Who's the Boss Now?

It's a blue ribbon day here at The Bat Cave when Wendy discovers a new category romance author. I really enjoyed Susannah Erwin's first two books with Harlequin Desire so when the third book in her Titans of Tech world, Who's the Boss Now?, landed on my Kindle, I was ready to dive right in.  Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed the first two books in this series, this one floundered for me.

Marguerite Delacroix's family used to be in the wine-making business and it's all she has ever wanted, well besides resuming control of St. Isadore's, the Napa Valley vineyard that had been in the family for generations. Even though she begged her parents to hang on to the land so she could one day take over management, her parents sold it, took early retirement and uprooted to Arizona. After Marguerite got hosed at her last vineyard job (a former boyfriend took credit for all her great ideas and then proceeded to drag her name through the mud), she reaches out to St. Isadore's current owner. They have a handshake agreement (because apparently she learned NOTHING) where she's grossly underpaid, but takes a cut of the back-end and slowly buys the vineyard from him. Of course the old man dies before it's all finalized and the ledger that has the record of this handshake agreement has gone missing. So our girl, again apparently having learned nothing, decides to break into the winery to steal the test bottles she has stashed in the cellar. Time is of the essence given that the dead owner's great-nephews just sold the winery to a tech bro and word on the street is he's going to tear down the winery and develop the land in other ways.

Of course the tech bro in question, Evan Fletcher, is already in residence and of course he catches Marguerite in the act. What follows is a comedy of errors with them talking circles around each other (she's not really stealing you see - but will admit she technically is trespassing) and then the sheriff shows up not to arrest Marguerite (who he knows by the by....) but to return Evan's 21-year-old brother who was up to shenanigans, and then the power goes out because sure, why not?  Evan bought the winery as an investment property with the idea that his 21-year-old brother would run it someday and recognizes he needs to hire staff to pull the winery back from the brink - so sure, why not hire the woman he just caught BREAKING INTO HIS NEW HOME.

I love category romance. I've been around the Amnesiac Cowboy Sheikh Who Has A Secret Baby block a time or two. My credulity will strain pretty dang far. Heck, the set-up for Erwin's first book was pretty convoluted (hero needs to get married to save a business deal).  But this one?  I just couldn't go there. I get that the heroine got stonewalled by the great-nephews, but honestly breaking and entering? That's extreme even for me. And then there's the fact that she doesn't demand an agreement with the former owner IN WRITING with all the legal i's dotted and t's crossed. If I'm to believe the winery is THAT important to her the fact she's so lackadaisical about purchasing it just makes her look really, really stupid.

And while I'm on the subject of buying a Napa Valley vineyard - y'all realize how much property in Napa costs? Especially a winery sitting on several acres of land? Even a small operation is going to cost millions - and that's before you factor in labor costs and actually growing grapes, producing wine etc. St. Isadore's is in trouble. It's not a thriving operation. Distribution is a mess and the property needs repairs and equipment upgrades. So exactly how realistic is it that the heroine's handshake deal is making her enough money on the back-end for her to BUY AN ENTIRE WINERY IN THE NAPA REAL ESTATE MARKET?!  Especially when there's no mention of a bank loan. No, she apparently paid off the entire thing with the dead owner and he croaked before the paperwork could be done.  I just - who buys a Napa Valley winery IN CASH unless you're the hero who has made millions being a tech bro? 

Honestly, had this been my first read by the author I would have DNF'ed it after the first chapter. That's how much the breaking and entering "meet cute" and real estate shenanigans annoyed me. But I pushed through because, like I mentioned, I really did enjoy Erwin's first two books. Quite a bit.  The stuff with Evan's brother is good and the romance is steamy - although Evan spent too much time in San Fransisco for my liking.  It would have been fine in a longer book, but Desires are really short (200 pages), so I feel like the story would have been better served had the author parked him in Napa sooner.

I just couldn't go there with this book. It annoyed me from the jump with the set-up. And when the set-up annoys the reader?  It's kind of a lost cause at that point. I will certainly be in line for the author's next book, that's how much I liked the first two. Here's hoping that this one is an outlying blip on my reading radar.

Final Grade = C-

2 comments:

azteclady said...

Fingers crossed this one fail is a fluke.

Keira Soleore said...

I am laughing so hard. There was this constant "and then," "and then," "and then," and more and more gets heaped on.