Avon, $5.99, ISBN 0-06-073476-0
Romantic Suspense, 2005

Listen closely as heroine Evangeline “Evie” Randall explains why she will never ever eat a crab.

“That’s beside the point. A decent crab would have stayed. They were half his responsibility, after all, whether he loved her or not.”

She will not eat crabs because the male crab does not stay with the female crab to raise the eggs after mating season is over.

She is not joking. I repeat. She is not joking.

Maybe it’s just my bias showing here as I am a card-carrying member of the Die-Die-Die club advocating the slow and painful death to idiot romance heroines everywhere, but Evie tortures me slowly and agonizingly with each turn of the page. I’ve said in the author’s debut that the heroine in that book can’t stand up to the hero and allows him to drive her into a frenzy of flabbergasted stink face too easily. Here, Evie is pretty much a walking punchline because she has zero – zip, zilch – sense of humor. She actually blames herself for not realizing that her Dear Daddy Figure had cancer and her not being there to share his pain. Even better, when the dead man’s testament revealed that he knew that he was the target of a murderer, Evie is further anguished because if only she somehow knows that someone is out to kill Thomas Evanston Heyworth, she could have at least have him confide in her. I have to love a woman who makes everything all about her. I can understand why Thomas wants to spend his last few days alone because one chapter of this overly-emotional martyr-prone passive and humorless poster girl for the consequences of irregular psychiatric evaluation has me wishing that the world is a little more silent too.

The plot of the story sinks this book although Evie is the thousand-ton burden that helps the ship sink faster. Here, the author tries to combine the thrills of amateur sleuthing, a treasure hunt, and a conventional murder but the result isn’t an intriguing Agatha Christie-like plot as much as it is a bewildering mess of inconsistencies. As I’ve alluded to earlier, Thomas Evanston Heyworth is dead. A famous writer of mystery novels in the last four decades, he adopted Evie when she was barely a teen and raised her. Maybe he flogged her daily or something because Evie turned out to a complete stereotype of an overly-emotional creature embodying every irritating trait of a frigid prune with the emotional maturity of an insecure teenage girl. Anyway, upon his death, Thomas through his videotaped will reveals that he has arranged for a scavenger hunt that will give the winner everything in his huge wealth and estate – and even better, this hunt will also lead the winner to his murderer! I have to love a man who will lead the ones he claims to love to the welcoming arms of his killer.

Evie is teamed up with Thomas’s estranged stepson Max Galloway, who is a cop. Evie hates Max because Thomas and Max never talked after Thomas married Max’s mother, and Evie is therefore all about hating Max too because she thinks that Max is the bad son personified. At the end of the book, Thomas reveals that he was hoping to pair up those two for one lovely quasi-incestuous “My Foster Daughter and My Stepson Are Having Sex and That Is Too Cool, Woooo!” fanfare. If that is the case, why did he fuel Evie’s dislike for Max when he was alive? Won’t it make more sense tell Evie and Max that the other person is a nice and attractive someone that they should meet? Then again, he wanted to lead them and his other friends to the arms of his killer so what do I know? Maybe he hated them all and wanted them dead.

The clues the treasure hunters have are passages from Thomas’s books. These excerpts are deliberately campy and corny, but they also shed no clue for the reader to even try and follow the treasure trail along with the hunters. I am stuck like a hapless shepherd watching by the sidelines as the sheep run wild and start dancing on a busy highway. Watching silly people running up and down is so not my thing, I tell you.

As for the romance, it’s a dud because Max has to do everything. Evie, as I’ve said, is practically lobotomized because she cannot appreciate a joke, much less a pun, if it came up to her and kicked her in the jaw. Max has to be the one constantly providing the wisecracks, jokes, and what-not, and the one-man-show becomes exasperating because Evie is too easily baited and annoyed, thus preventing any genuine banter with Max. When Max starts saying that Evie is the one for him because she challenges him, I scratch my head at that because Evie’s a complete pushover and he knows all the buttons to push. Evie also comes off as a pathetically insecure and very needy woman searching for a male authority figure since she was eleven. The best thing I can say about her is that… er… well, maybe her spelling has improved since she was eleven, I suppose.

The identity of the villain is easy to deduce and it’s a long wait for the characters to catch up with me. A big thank-you to Evie for making that wait feels like ten thousand years of pain. Max, at least he tries very hard, I suppose. He has a lifetime now to try and get Evie to crack a joke so I wish him luck. He’ll need it. She doesn’t eat crabs because she thinks that the species are irresponsible, after all.

At any rate, I am really hard-pressed to find a reason to pretend that I enjoy reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evie even a little.