MIRA, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-7783-1800-2
Contemporary Romance, 2015
A Lover’s Vow is easily one of the dumbest stories I’ve come across in a while. This is basically a story all about Dalton Granger sexually harassing the heroine Jules Bradford and acting like a poster boy for enforced lobotomy on assholes everywhere. He hates Jules, mostly because she doesn’t bend over and spread out for him like apparently every other woman in his llife. But he wants her so badly, and he knows she wants him back. How? Because she wears sexy perfume… okay, she wears it to a public function, but oh, Dalton knows, her scent is her way of telling him, “Take me! Take me! I may say no but I’m secretly saying yes by wearing perfume out in public!” His thoughts often revolve around how easy and tempting it would be for him to just grab her, kiss her, strip her, and take her.
Of course, Jules may be an ex-cop turned PI, but Dalton laughs at her when she tells him that he’s being watched. A woman using a gun! Surely she’s joking! She’s better off bending over and putting out to him, you know! Okay, so she’s right, but he’s the man with the hundred-inch willy, so by god, she has better step aside and let him be in charge… even if he has no idea what is really going on!
Oh, and he tells her that he hates her but he’d stop bugging her if she’d let him shag her. Her response is to tell him to go insert his wee-wee into his asshole, and he spends a long time hating her even more for that response. Yes, the author actually uses the word ‘hate’ and ‘hating’ – I’m not sure what she is doing, but she succeeds in making me think that Dalton is, mentally, a spoiled eight-year old who needs to be smacked with a trowel a few times.
As you can tell, I really don’t like the hero, and I despise the fact that his brothers all know of his behavior but they enable him, as if such behavior is just that of a man who hasn’t found the right woman to ‘tame’ him yet. Seriously, Dalton’s a womanizing STD incubator who at the same time resents Jules for wearing sexy clothes and perfume in public. I have to double check the cover and the author’s name to be sure that this is not a romance aimed at readers of a particularly conservative religious bent.
What, the plot of this book? Unfortunately, it’s basically a cleaning up of loose ends kind of thing – you will have to read the previous two books in the series to get the whole picture. More unfortunately, this one only demonstrates plenty of lazy plotting and careless reliance on the hero behaving like a brainless asshole to advance the plot. Worse is that… well, you know how nowadays it’s becoming some kind of cliché that every other author of romances with black characters must blame every sin in this world on women who are not destined to star in future books? Well, this one will not buck that trend anytime soon. Yes, every other woman the womanizing hero screws is a whore – the hero, of course, is a catch – and so forth. Women killing other women out of jealousy – over a man, most of the time – seems to be a very big thing in such books. Do the authors get a bonus each time they feature such nonsense in their books?
One or two books with such nonsense is fine, of course. But when every other book of this sort just has to be like this, that’s when things become stupid, and I feel stupid as a result. I open this book, think, “Please, not another evil woman story!”, only to roll up my eyes when I reach the denouement and realize, what a surprise, it’s not a surprise at all.
Oh, and these people supposed to be finding ways to release the father from jail – he’s innocent, and it’s all another woman’s fault OF COURSE – but they spend more time having hate sex and planning dinner parties. What a family. Also, it’s eye-rolling time when this father can still have enough connections from behind bars that will make Lucious Lyon green with envy, to arrange for people to protect his sons and their wives. Therefore, nobody is actually in any serious danger in this story, so WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS ROMANTIC SUSPENSE? I mean, aside from putting men, even creepy assholes, on a pedestal and blaming women for everything wrong in this world?
A Lover’s Vow is a waste of time, money, everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go light some candles in the church for my dead brain cells.
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