Avon, $6.99, ISBN 0-380-81957-0
Paranormal Romance, 2001

What a lovely cover this book has. It’s just too bad the pages of Here and Now are dripping and oozing the creepiest and smelliest of cheese like a body in a B-grade horror movie dripping fake blood. Constance O’Day-Flannery’s books are pretty much touch and go buys, and I’m sad to say that this one, her newest, has the author channeling the Psychic Network gone haywire again.

The plot is this: noble bootlegger Charles Garrity jumps off a bridge in 1926 when his best friend Miles betrays him and tries to kill him. In present day, pregnant heroine Suzanne McDermott is standing at the bridge, contemplating how her husband left him like this, the irresponsible SOB (insert trademark Constance O’Day-Flannery-style rant here), when she sees a man drowning. Like a Wonder Woman who has swallowed a watermelon, she rescues him. And goes into labor. Aww!

Charles, dazed, nonetheless manages to get Suz to the hospital and the baby is born safely. Suz calls Charles a hero. Awwww. Charles tells her his story, and together, they wonder what to do with him. And while they are wondering, they exchange dialogues that ooze and dribble like rancid cheese, complete with rhetorical questions, gratuitous exclamation marks, and sweeping purple imagery about stars and skies and grasses that will make even Sookie in Gilmore Girls puke.

There’s some action finally in a “I’m too good for her so I will leave for her own good!” way and the obligatory wrap up of Charles’s vendetta with his ex-best friend. Both aren’t interesting in the first place, but with all the cheese and saccharine and overblown dialogues flying at me like shurikens of Japanese ninjas out to kill, the whole Here and Now experience is more akin to drowning in a vat of liquid cheese.