Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 1-59998-590-X
Contemporary Erotica, 2008
I think I must have fallen into another dimension or something when within the first fifteen pages of Lost but Not Forgotten, our hero Jake O’Malley spends time ogling the heroine and telling her how good she looks in handcuffs before telling her that her mother is dead. I don’t know about anyone else but I’d put telling the woman he supposedly loves that her mother has kicked the bucket will be higher on his priority list than “You look good in handcuffs.”
I’m getting ahead of myself. Our heroine Alexis “Allie” Knight is thought to have died in some fire in the Amazon when she shows up at her mother’s place. It’s actually Jake’s place now since he’s bought it after the death of Allie’s mother. Apparently Allie kicks up a fuss that their cop buddy has to handcuff her to the bed. This same cop friend happily tells Jake and Allie that he’s going off to a vacation in the Caribbean before telling her that, oh yes, he’s sorry about her mother.
For three supposedly close friends, with two of them realizing that Allie is safe, these people are acting as if they have just bumped into each other while attempting to perform stand-up comedy in a half-empty club.
The characters behave somewhat normal by the next chapter but by then, I’m already feeling that Mackenzie McKade is trying too hard to incorporate the “handcuffed to the bed” selling-point gimmick into this story at the expense of logic.
It turns out that Allie has had amnesia of her time in Amazon. She has no idea what happened from the time she lost her memory to the time she regains it. She moves back into her mother’s house, now Jake’s, and begins to feel attracted to Jake because he’s now a hunk while he was only some dweeby fellow back then. However, with her being involved in some pharmaceutical espionage thingy and her new friends from Amazon out to get her and put her down for good, she has better start remembering things fast.
The problem with Lost but Not Forgotten is that, due to the way the author sets up the story, it seems like a book in the middle of a series. The villains appear out of nowhere. Am I supposed to know them from a previous book by this author? There are many questions about Allie’s time in the Amazon that are not answered fully. Am I supposed to read her story in a previous book or something?
This one feels like a romantic suspense written around love scenes rather the other way around. As far as I know, this book is not part of any series, but I’m afraid I’m a little lost myself.
