Three Lake Books, $3.99, ISBN 978-0463357903
Romantic Suspense, 2019
Firstly, thank you so much to the author for sharing a link to the cover model’s portfolio page. Unfortunately, while the page gives the model a more stereotypical masculine moniker “Simon C”, the author gives away that the fellow’s name is Simon Cooki.
Hey, don’t laugh. There’s no shame in that last name, as the Cookie Monster still remains the manliest stud on Sesame Street, just so everyone knows, and there are twenty inches of solid reasons why Bert and Ernie invite him to their marital boudoir every other weekend. Well, that’s what those authors at those scary places at the Internet tell me anyway.
Our hero in My Forever Cocky Biker Encounter is Scott Free. Boy, the author really knows how to go deep there with her profound phraseology tinged with deeper meanings. He’s in a MC club, because MC clubs are the new Justice League of Buy All the Dudes’ Books.
Maybe it’s different in the US, but I do know a few of what passes for MC club blokes in my part of the world, and I can tell you: they smell of sweat, leather, and facial hair that needs a trim with garden shears. They are mostly married, and they don’t like it when women intrude into their club time, because that’s when they get away from their wives or girlfriends to hang out with the boys. Make no mistake, I like those guys, they can tell some of the filthiest jokes ever, but thanks to them, I have a hard time taking seriously those fake MC club guys in romance novels, heh.
Anyway, the Concrete Angels MC needs a forensic accountant, so Scott kidnaps our heroine Oriana Hunter to do their bidding. Okay, maybe not kidnap, as we all know when a hot guy drags a woman to do his bidding, it’s just foreplay.
She has to help them get to the bottom of a plot, because how else is instant-love supposed to happen between her and him. What, dating? Please, we’re no longer in the 20th century, these days we just instant-love and instant-mate bond in five seconds after the first meet.
The plot feels a lot like the author is just making things up as she goes along, but as I turn the pages, the absurdity just keeps piling up until I find myself just hand-waving the whole thing with an eye roll—especially when the woo-woo stuff shows up. It’s hard to consider the plot illogical or poorly constructed when it’s just so ridiculous that I can’t even take it seriously enough in the first place.
Scott doesn’t seem cocky at all. In fact, he seems pretty nice for an MC guy—no brooding angst that he uses as an excuse to be cruel, no weird sex fetishes, and definitely no fleas.
Oriana is exactly the Strong Independent Woman type that seems to come out on a conveyor belt in a manufacturing plant these days. She, of course, is sassy and snappy regardless of circumstance because that’s all you need to be such a heroine these days, but she also has some PTSD that needs the D to be pressed tighter up the S so that it’s finally a party of an S on D. “Oh, I’m a strong and proud woman that uses feisty one liners to show what a liberated modern feminist icon I am, but I need the dongle so badly, but not in a way that makes me look like a ho… I know, I have PTSD so I need the deeeeeeeee!”
Eventually, Oriana learns that the MC people are all amazing, real, awesome, better than everyone else in the world, so they are all going to stick together and inbreed the hell out of one another so that the X-Men League of Marvel Superheroes MC uber-humans eventually outnumber and cleanse the rest of humanity that is ugly, fat, broke, and disgusting and the world shall finally know peace and beauty and sexy forever and ever, amen.
And people wonder why I can never take any MC romance romp seriously.
