Dell, $6.50, ISBN 0-440-23714-9
Contemporary Romance, 2002

Melina Dimitris is a private investigator who met Sebastian Knight some time ago in a bar, they have a hot four-night-stand, and he dumps her just like that. Now, if I go into a bar, meet a hot stud, and do the kazoo with him, I don’t think I will be too heartbroken if we go our separate ways soon after. I mean, jeez, we met at a bar, of all things, and I bet the bar where those two met didn’t have LONG TERM THING WEEK banners posted all over the place.

Anyway, Melina is still hurt about that. She thinks about him all the time, muttering that all men are bitches or something close to that. So when some kids run away to discover some “Yo, What Happened to My Mommy?” nonsense, including Sebastian’s long-suffering daughter, Sebastian has to hire Melina to find them, and of course, sparks fly again, blah blah blah, and oh, Marilyn Pappano wants to tell everybody that yes, all women are bitches too, the heroine and all the women in the perfect small town of Bethlehem who have their romance stories excepted of course.

Like the kids who ran away? Two of them have a drug addict skank/bitch/ho/slut mother. Sebastian’s jackass behavior is because he has a nasty bitch mother. Everything wrong with the world has its roots in Evil Women. Thank you, Eve, for eating that bloody apple instead of stuffing it up where the sun never shines on Adam.

But what makes me really lose it is the ending. Sebastian acts like a jerk all the way to the end. Okay. I’m even okay with the dumb pop-psychology nonsense. But I’m not okay with Sebastian’s speech at the end, which is something in the effect of “Look, I’m an ass, but you are not blameless too, because you have a hand in me being an ass by… oh WTF, you love me, so let’s suck face!”

I toss Heaven on Earth onto the floor and ground my heel into the book. Yes, I’m five years old but damn, that feels good, my heel on this book. And my middle finger salute that follows was just the thing to make me feel better.