Ballantine, $6.99, ISBN 0-345-46785-X
Historical Romance, 2004
Nicole Jordan seems to have settled on a workable formula. She doesn’t write stories anymore. She just writes pages and pages of sex scenes more purple than pornographic and pads the pages when the hero experiences his refractory period with unimaginative usage of painful stereotypes.
Lord of Seduction is the story of the usual “I will never love again, all women are evil but I will boink them all anyway but I am really hurting inside so love me all you virgins, anoint my prodigious dong with your chaste virtue!” rake shagging a mistress and then fending off the tidal onslaught of society skanks before he finds the tormented artistic heroine with trust issues (she doesn’t trust men, you see, because a cad hurt her) to coerce into a fake affair.
Meanwhile, there are subplots involving espionage, letters, villains, and murder but these subplots are drowned by a marathon of… well, unfortunately, not sex as much as tepid, contrived, ultra-cheesy coitus interruptus scenes. Ms Jordan uses heroine Diana Sheridan’s mistrust of men as a painful way to make sure that A doesn’t fit completely into B until she has padded enough pages as per her contract with her publisher.
To call the plot predictable and trite is like saying that porn movies don’t have good acting – there are understatements and then there are understatements, if you know what I mean. What else is there? Since this book is designed to whet the palette of the carnally inclined reader unable to get her hands on decent erotica for one reason or the other, I guess the quality of the love scenes is paramount.
But alas, all there are in this book are plenty of tedious clenching alpha male buttocks and heaving bosoms that are ready to break out into Catholic guilt music the moment the hero touches a sensitive spot in the heroine.
The whole book is a horrifically inept example of erotica-wannabe best suited for readers who really do not know how good the “real” sexy stuff out there can be and are content to settle for amateurish attempts like Lord of Seduction.
