Lovespell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52371-X
Contemporary Romance, 2000

I don’t know about the lovers part in Lovers and Other Lunatics, but I can tell you there’s a lot of lunacy going on in here. Most of the lunacy is at the expanse of the heroine’s dignity (Teresa Phelps will appreciate anyone who will return it). Maybe some readers will have a great time. Me, I can say reading this one is like me being Alice visiting a Wonderland while high on LSD.

I have no idea how Theresa got that far up the academia rung, but this woman, after escaping her kidnapper, runs back to the kidnapper’s car to get back her just-bought towels. She finds her house ransacked, but her first priority is to hang the towels so that her aunt will be impressed.

Obviously someone has let Theresa loose on the controlled drugs section at the local pharmaceuticals store.

The hero Charles kidnaps her because she holds some key to some treasure thing, and since she’s so hot, he must fall in love with her. There are some gangsters too, but I don’t intend to untangle the ridiculous plot here. I have enough headache trying not to take my granddaughter’s black crayon and start stabbing at the pages of this book as it is.

Let’s just say that in the midst of the really convoluted plot, the hero and heroine are nothing much that life-size cardboard figures. Then again, the heroine mourns after her brother’s death, so maybe that counts as depth. The secondary characters are, needless to say, worse off. But worst is the heroine’s attempts to be cute and make me giggle. The whole effort seems forced – a heroine who offers a drink to her kidnapper because he’s cute is definitely on her way to extinction if natural selection has its way – and borders on being gag-inducing.