Sins Of Summer is part of the A Midsummer's Night Steam series of anthologies, with this one focusing on the ménage à trois arrangements of the two heroes and single heroine. Most stories of this nature are terribly written, what with ridiculous lack of credible character motivation and all, and the stories here are no different.

One of the more prevalent clichés in erotic romance is the gay couple who are seeking the perfect woman to be their third playmate. And it's supposed to be true love. I have no idea why two men who are supposedly happy cornholing each other will want to bring in a third party because it is not as if two people in a relationship aren't complicated enough. And of course, the woman is naturally happy that when she's not being shagged by one guy, another guy is shagging her because she's a bunny of endless stamina who doesn't get sore or tired or anything. But this Gay Couple Seeks Bimbo Girlfriend thing must be a pretty lucrative fantasy if so many authors choose to write about it. That or everyone has run out of ideas, I suppose. Dawn Halliday's Fantasmagorical is another of these stories.

Evan Knight - she's our heroine - travels with her best friend to the exclusive Fantasm Island which is a shag-all-you-want place, although since within pages our heroine's best friend is on her knees servicing some fellow I find myself wondering just who is supposed to be having fun here. If I come to a sex resort and I realize that I'm expected to service men without them repaying the favor, I'm out of that place faster than you can say, "Wow, that was quick!"

Our heroes Gabe Lariat - with a name like that, he has to be a lacrosse player when he was in high school - and his friend Lance are looking for that one special woman. I'll let them explain it:

They’d shared women many, many times over their long friendship, especially since discovering some time a few years back that what would make them whole would be a third. A woman to complete their circle.

What circle? Are they some kind of geometry-obsessed nerds? Are they looking for some poor woman to cook and clean after them while they spend the day looking into each other's eyes and blow air kisses to each other? Why do we have two men thinking that they need to share one woman instead of each finding a girlfriend of his own? Are they from some kind of society where a woman is married to the entire football team?

I don't know. The author doesn't tell. This story is therefore just two weird guys shagging a silly woman and telling everything that they are in love at the end. Yeah, right. Fantasmagoria is just a silly short smutty romp for those readers who just can't get enough of these one-dimensional cardboard twin erection heroes and their ménage à trois silliness. At the rate we are going, "ménage à trois" may soon become another euphemism for "unimaginatively formulaic and silly smutty stories".

Mackenzie McKade's Take Me has one too many short paragraphs.

Of one sentence. Or maybe three sentences at most.

It can be very annoying, needless to say.

But then again, I probably shouldn't expect more from Take Me since it's nothing more than some sex scenes held together by a paper-thin plot with some ménage à trois thrown in because it's fashionable to do things in threes. In this case, the hero Cord Daily and the heroine Caitlyn Culver are in love and the third person is Cord's cousin Dolan Crane.

A part me of wonders what kind of true love we are talking about here when the man happily invites a cousin along to play with the girlfriend. Is this story set in some kind of swinger community? I have no idea. Ms McKade just puts in the threesome scene as if having threesomes is something everyone does nowadays especially on Thanksgiving parties or whatever. No psychology, no character development, just a wham-bang-pass-the-Kleenex-ma'am type of story.

Oh yes, the story. Cord and Cait are in love, I am told, since she was sixteen and he was twenty. But her father threatened four years ago to drive the Daily ranch into bankruptcy if Cord or Dolan dared to sniff around Cait so Cord tried to keep away from her. Today, she is back in town with a vengeance, determined to play hard to get in order to land Cord. Only, her scheme backfires when Cord ropes in Dolan to corral her into some kinky games.

Towards the end of the story there is some issue about how Cait realizes that her father is a mean fellow and she loves Cord, but too much of this story focuses on sex scenes to the point that there is really nothing else about this story to write about.

Unfortunately for Ms McKade, I'm really not into "quickies", "trysts", or whatever they call these short smutty stories nowadays. I like my stories with some... well, stories. At any rate, any readers out there who want some quick titillation, knock yourself out. I'm looking for more than some forgettable ooh-la-la's so I'll just keep looking elsewhere. As with all things rushed and quick, I must say it has been a pretty forgettable and most disappointing experience.

Marie Harte's A Scorching Seduction has a lovely futuristic romance pet peeve of mine - the abuse of awkward arrangement of alphabets and apostrophes in the names of the characters. The heroine's name is Fia af' Nicos while the heroes are Trace N'tre and Vaan C'vail. I'm just happy that there is no one named Xaand'er Cth'uluuon here. Yes, there are two heroes here with the most embarrassingly droopy names ever.

Fia is posing as a waitress in the Pacifica Resort in Planet Ermu. Apparently the folks here are all sex-mad and horny but Fia isn't here to play, she's here to spy on Trace and Vaan. Ugh, just typing their names feels somehow wrong. Why can't Ms Harte give her heroes more normal names like Bruce and Harry? Anyway, Trace is the best assassin of Racor while Vaan is the "high commander of covert operations in Racor’s TAC Army". From what I understand, Racor is a moon - it is also where Fia comes from. Fia is a Vendon, folks with the ability to morph their appearance considerably to camouflage themselves (think of Mystique from The X-Men - Fia is a little like that), so she's the perfect woman for the job... except for the fact that the twin suns of Ermu can switch on the horny nymphomaniac in Fia. No, I don't think sunscreen will help.

Trace and Vaan have been wrongly accused of plotting to kill the Prime by a mean high-ranking Racor officer so they are laying low at the moment in this resort. Unknown to them, Fia is spying on them on behalf of the Prime and her brother who is a high-ranking security officer but she is becoming increasingly certain that these two are innocent. Then her cover is blown and she now has two giant penises hot on her behind.

I'm not sure why our heroine doesn't use her skills to disguise herself once her cover is blown but I don't think plot is of much importance here as much as the sex scenes. Like many generic and unrealistic ménage à trois stories out there, this one doesn't fully explore the psychology of the main characters. Everyone just happens to be in a sharing mood here. On the bright side, I can tell Trace and Vann apart a little bit. Not much, but still, a little counts for something.

There is nothing particularly outstanding or bad about A Scorching Seduction. It's a pleasant tale of sexual romp and a little bit of plot, no doubt meant to be breezed through in one sitting and tossed aside without much thought afterwards.

In Dawn Halliday's Honeymoon Castaways, Catalina and Dave Robinson are newlyweds on their way to their honeymoon when the plane, piloted by their buddy Andreas Bailey, goes down. Don't worry, Cat and Dave soon put Barbados out of their mind as they both end up playing saucy Swiss Family Robinson games with Andreas. It's safe to say that they don't blame him for the plane going down.

I actually have seen a movie with a similar plot but it ended up with the wife and the pilot killing the husband gruesomely by feeding him to sharks so that they can run off together. No, I'm not talking about whatever Lost 'Shipper fantasies some of you may be harboring.

On one hand, I really like how the author portrays Andreas as this fellow who is attracted to Cat and can't help feeling like some starving kid staring hungrily with his face pressed against the glass pane at the cake on display in a bakery. But Cat's attraction to Andreas as well as Dave's don't ring real. The story starts out with some promise of more realistic character development than most ménage à trois stories out there but it soon becomes another standard "we do it in threes because we can, baby, wheee!" story.

I believe this is probably the best of the threesome stories in the anthology but I also think I prefer that movie more.

Rating: 55

This book at Amazon.com

This book at Amazon UK

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