Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-1-335-21659-5
Contemporary Romance, 2018
His San Diego Sweetheart by Yahrah St John is, at its core, the love story of a douchebag and a twit. It’s part of the Millionaire Moguls series. These days, it’s hard to tell the difference between a Kimani story that can stand alone and one that can’t, because everyone’s busy cramming in robotic and too-obvious appearances of sequel baits that show up just to say “Buy my book!” before disappearing from the scene – so I suppose it’s probably pointless to say whether this one can or can’t. It’s part of a series. If you’ve read enough of these books, you will know what I mean when I say it’s mostly filler as we all wait for the next book in this series.
Vaughn Ellicott is a millionaire. A former naval officer – not sure why this is relevant unless the author wants me to link the navy with a severe case of douchebaggery – he is now a millionaire five years after starting an online business selling wet suits. I suppose it’s possible, although given that in the five years he also spends so much on things like cars and other bling-bling, I can only wonder whether his wet suits are shipped with brick-sized bags of cocaine in them.
Oh, and he knows that women love his sexy body, because he spends his entire day working on those muscles. But he knows that all women are whores who want his money, so he approaches women expecting sex on the first date, but that’s all they are going to get from him, you see, as they are all whores who just want his money. Seriously, that’s his entire shtick laid bare on page two of this story.
Also, the author wants me to know that he drives a Ferrari wherever he goes, and he also has a private jet, and in the same page, she wants me to applaud the fact that our hero has an office in an environmentally-friendly building. Does the author even know what she is writing about, or is she just throwing words together and calling it a day as long as the sentences are grammatically sound? Unless, I suppose, her master plan is to plant the impression in my head that Vomit Heavingpot is a hypocrite chauvinist twat as well as a likely drug peddler.
That’s basically everything about the author’s game plan when it comes to the hero: contradictions upon contradictions piled on in a manner that suggests strongly that the author is oblivious to the whole cringe-causing mess, with a heavy sprinkling on douchebag assholery and a distasteful sense of entitlement when it comes to scoring with the opposite sex.
I suppose it makes sense that the only way any sane woman will want to spend more than a day with this thing is if she were coerced. Indeed, Miranda Jensen has that usual asshole grandfather who insisted on micromanaging the traffic to his granddaughter’s tunnel of love even from beyond the grave, hence a will stipulating that she marries before she is thirty. Else, all the money will go to charity and our heroine will never, ever be able to open her own B&B. I suppose she is incapable of getting a bank loan for some reason. So, she needs a husband ASAP.
The rest of the story is pretty standard for a formulaic part-of-a-series romance that could have been very well written by some kind of intelligent word processor, one in which the romance happens only because various secondary characters insist to the heroine that the hero deserves yet another chance because, underneath the perpetual douchebaggery marathon, Vomit is actually a good man. Really! And for that, the pinnacle conflict of this story is him accusing her of cheating on him because he sees her talking to another man. That’s the kind of late conflict that will convince me that he’s mellowed and become good husband material, oh yes indeed! Oh, and every man in the heroine’s past is a cartoon scum, because how else will the hero come off looking like a darling in comparison?
The only surprise here, I guess, is that it is the hero’s father for once, instead of the usual evil mommy, who insists that every woman who dares to latch on to Vomit’s heaving pot for more than two seconds must be a gold digging ho. Sigh, even the cartoon family dynamics here has already been done to death many times before.
His San Diego Sweetheart is fundamentally joyless and entertainment-free. The only good thing I can say about it is that at least I don’t spot any obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes among the pages. Also, the cover isn’t bad, I suppose, but that’s about it.
