Liquid Silver Books, $5.75, ISBN 978-1-59578-787-3
Fantasy Romance, 2011
Stacey Kennedy’s Bless the Beauty is an urban fantasy take on the unprofessional antics of some FBI agents.
Chase Findley and Hadley Sloane are not only colleagues, they are lovers. Worse, they are both withholding the fact that Hadley, our heroine, is a vampire from the higher-ups. She’s the kind of heroine who wishes that she can wear sexy short skirts at work so that she can tease Chase. She also uses her abilities to manipulate her bosses into assigning night hour shifts to her and Chase. Yes, they are FBI agents. What, you don’t feel very reassured that they will be good at their job?
In this story, Chase and Hadley race against time to locate and rescue two victims held somewhere by a serial killer. The serial killer had been arrested, but he’s not talking. Hadley can’t use her mind bending skills to get the location of those victims right away, because the author needs this story to be a bit longer than 10 pages and there is a silly reason, therefore, for Hadley to do things the old-fashioned human way. In the meantime, Hadley’s vampire husband and maker, Kellen Boyd, shows up as the newest member of the FBI. He and Chase soon literally bitch slap each other – in a macho, masculine manner, of course – while Hadley is like, oh, she used to be Kellen’s submissive sex doll so she can’t possibly resist Kellen now… ooh.
These three spend so much time sniffing at each other and acting all silly that I can only feel sorry for the two victims, tucked away somewhere and wondering when they will be rescued. As I’ve said, this story has our FBI agents behaving so unprofessionally, bickering and shagging and hissing at each other even on the job when people’s lives are at stake, that I can only cringe at the whole thing.
The characters behave like immature teenagers with hormones gone awry, but perhaps they will still be fine if the story had a different plot than this one. As it is, this one only has me wondering why these three hormonal dingbats don’t just take their nonsense somewhere else and leave the life-saving gig to the real professionals.
