Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-59578-441-4
Erotic Thriller, 2008

This is going to make me come off like a complete sexist pig, but I know there are readers who feel this way, so I should alert them of this: Roscoe James is a man, and this story really does seem to be written by a man. Okay, that sounds stupid, so I have better explain. If you are used to the structure and “feel” of a romantic story written by a female author, you won’t find that story in Deer Run Falls. It is patterned after the typical male fantasy version of a romance. A James Bond type of fantasy, in other words.

I mean, we start off with our uber hunk, ex-cop-turned PI John O’Bannon, who is approached, teased, and seduced by the hot Jeri Lynn Lee, a character whose function is solely to have sex with the hero before setting the hero off on his mission. She wants him to kill her husband but of course he says no. Meanwhile, Judge Horatio Robert Lee wants to hire him too. Yes, he’s Jeri’s husband. Jeri claims that she has been raped and Horatio wants John to figure out who the rapist is. You’d think a man who is drawn into this plot despite himself would think better of depositing his DNA inside a woman who may be pretending to be raped in a plot against her husband, but John happily boinks Jeri again after listening to her tale. And then in the next chapter, he’s sticking it to one Hushi Humma, a sexy half-Choctaw who is also genetically programmed to drop her clothes to the hero without much prompting.

There is a story here, but it’s a flimsy one. Deer Run Falls is a male fantasy through and through compared to the female fantasy typified in a romance novel, with all these women throwing themselves at the hero as the author winks at me and has the hero wondering why these women are so hot for him. As vicarious escapes go, there is nothing wrong with this one. It just happens to be something that I am not looking for in my books – I’m bored flat by the story.