Catherine Tramell, $0.99, ISBN 979-8215883754
Contemporary Romance, 2022

Doctor Bold by Catherine Tramell is probably the story that inspired a hundred messy TikTok rants from jaded women about terrible men, or is it the other way around?

It’s very simple, the story.

Dr Damon Cowell and Dr Monique Aragon—sheesh, did the author use some random name generator for these characters?—are friends with benefits.

Damon wants to make it official, but Monique for some reason wants Damon to also sleep with his stepsister because… I don’t know, I think she wants him to have options or something.

Oh, and Monique feels rather jealous or competitive or just all out weird when it comes to that other woman, Tricia Robinson, so that makes sense. Which sane woman doesn’t want her man to sleep with a woman she has a weird resentment-ambivalence thing toward?

Meanwhile, Tricia decides she will sleep with Damon and show him that she screws better than Monique so he will be all hers.

So, Damon sleeps with Monique in this story, then sleeps with Tricia, decides that he’d like to sleep with Monique better, and I suppose leaves Tricia fuming in the room and whipping out her phone to do a rant on her TikTok account.

What is this?

On one hand, I’ve love to have an understanding partner that will give me a permanent hall pass to sleep with any hot guy that catches my eye, without any need to pay the piper, so a part of me wonders what kind of trick Damon did to Monique to make her so noble and generous like that. Teach me, senpai!

On the other hand, really, what is this?

Had this been some kind of character study about weird ticks and tocks inside a romance heroine’s brain, it’s not working as this story is nowhere long enough to flesh out the psychological aspects behind this ménage à trois that is such a failure it never really gets started in the first place.

Mind you, I’m not against such a premise, it’s just that the characters’ motivations and feelings were never developed beyond the quarter-baked stage. The whole thing feels like a rather vapid game of sexy musical chairs in which the only person that is truly happy out of this whole mess is Damon.

Had this been an erotica, it is nowhere explicit and detailed enough to make the reader feel the oohs and aahs of these characters. Indeed, at one point I am stifling a yawn as I start to read about Damon and Tricia bopping. I happen to blink for a second before resuming my reading only to go, “Wait, that sex scene is over already?”

When Tricia claims that the sex is the best in her life, I can only wonder about her past lovers, because judging from the length of the scene and perfunctory feel of it, I am sure a battery-powered boyfriend will give her a much better time.

Doctor Bold ends up being a disappointing read. I’d like something thicker, longer, more substantial, and harder hitting, and sadly, this one just flails limply for a short while before drooping and dribbling in defeat.