Pathforgers Publishing, $4.99, ISBN 978-1370475155
Romantic Suspense, 2023 (Reissue)
Alexis Abbott’s Criminal resembles something written by committee after conducting a marketing survey on what the hottest trends of the moment in Kindle Unlimited are.
√ Stepbrother
√ Man-slut stepbrother
√ Criminal man-slut stepbrother
√ Alpha criminal man-slut stepbrother
Our heroine, Abigail, is not like her stepbrother’s Kaiden’s other women. You see, every man thinks she is hot and some paw her now and then, but she doesn’t like that, okay, because those men are not Kaiden and, oh, the author really wants readers to understand that Kaiden may sleep and dump a woman every other day, but those women are sluts and totally deserve getting dumped.
In fact, the first few pages of this story is basically the author showing Kaiden having sexy times openly in the same house with Abigail, all the while our heroine rants about what hos and sluts these women are while she also wishes that she can have some of that stepbrother piece of meat.
Double standards? Well, if romance heroines don’t have them, they’d have no standards at all.
Speaking of standards, our heroine is homeless, so she is forced to crash in with her hot stepbrother whom she has had a crush on since forever, and I’m sure the author doesn’t intend that to be as creepy as it is. However, after bailing her slutty criminal stepbrother ass out of jail, she is forced to dress like a hoochie-mama and serve tables in a seedy bar because I guess she is too dumb to qualify for other jobs.
Then again, that job also allows Abigail to rant some more about how immodest women are sluts, so I guess the whole thing is by design. Love slutty men, hate their conquests, because men can do no wrong and we blame all their sins on other women.
Kaiden naturally is horrified because his stepsister is now dressing skanky with the possibility of getting deflowered by man-slut criminal alpha males that aren’t him.
What follows is a totally messy story of a dumb heroine that insists on playing the martyr for a useless, irresponsible, emotionally abusive asshole. Honestly, I don’t understand why he can’t just get a proper job himself, since it’s clear that Abigail is too dumb to consider getting any other job other than waiting tables at some seedy craphole.
Then again, if these two trashy people have any working brain cells, there won’t be any story to tell here.
Anyway, this story is by the numbers predictable if one has read enough of these emotionally abusive bad boy romances where the guy’s only redeeming trait is that he can make a woman orgasm ten times in five minutes, because my goodness, everything else about him screams bad hygiene and STDs.
This particular bad boy doesn’t even have much of a job prospect, so any woman dumb enough to shackle herself to him will be suffering while in penury. Oh yeah, that woman is Abigail.
So yes, Criminal is everything a generic assembly line stepbrother-bad boy-criminal-tattoo-slut-alpha-psycho romance can wish to be. If that’s your thing, then this is comfort food. Otherwise, just bail on this thing.
