Samhain Publishing, $2.50, ISBN 978-1-60928-479-4
Paranormal Romance, 2011
Matt laughed, and Ronna looked up at the sound, smiling in reaction. He flicked his gaze away from the doorway and met her eyes, his green ones sparkling between thick lashes. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me I’m going to meet a beautiful stranger?”
Ronna Mitchell is a human polygraph machine. When she touches someone, she can ferret out everything that the person tries to hide. This makes her a valuable employee of Karmic Consultants, they who put the “psi” in CSI, but her abilities also make it difficult for her to establish decent long-term relationships. She moonlights as Madame Ramona, palm reader with a cheesy Jamaican accent, at the local carnival because it is one way for her to spend her free time. It is during her gig one evening that she meets Matt Halloway, a cop who is on the trail of an assassin. He lets her read his palm, and what do you know, she realizes that he’s her destined sweetheart. Oh, and he’s in a danger. He’s being set up. In fact, he will most likely die that night. But will he even listen to her if she tries to warn him?
Vivi Andrews is usually a reliable author to me, as her stories have been consistently well-written and enjoyable. This one, however, is the odd duck of the bunch, mostly because it focuses on Matt trying to figure out what the killer is up to and Ronna chasing after him and trying to get him to even listen to her. The romance barely figures because there is no courtship here, just a mate ex machina plot device that expects me to accept that these two are just meant to be. They just are! Unfortunately, in this story, Matt comes off as an unfortunately inept but stubborn cop who can’t see the obvious for way too long, especially for someone who is supposed to have good hunches about things. This doesn’t bode well for the future relationship. He’d probably suspect her neighbors of being terrorists and accidentally blow up their house or something.
A Cop and a Feel has a cute title, but the plot of this story just isn’t well executed in this very short story format.
| 
