Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86443-0
Contemporary Romance, 2016
Lisa Marie Perry’s One Night With You is the final book in the The Blue Dynasty series and… hold on.
Okay, I’ve checked and I have indeed read the previous books in this series, but I did it well out of order. I also don’t remember Zaf Ahmadi and Josephine de la Peña in those stories, so I’m lost early on when this story assumes that I am familiar with all the details of their previous interactions as well as the back stories of the large cast of supporting characters here. In other words, this is indeed a final entry of a series that feels more like a reunion party than anything else.
Anyway, Josephine was a DEA agent until she was shot by “Archangel”, her now ex-boyfriend Zaf during an undercover stint gone awry. The bullet caused her to undergo a few surgeries and ended her career, so she’s still bitter about Zaf.
Still, because our heroine is BFF with all the main characters of the previous books, she doesn’t have to wallow around town homeless or anything. She gets a job at the Las Vegas Slayers to make sure that the players are not doing naughty things like taking drugs.
Naturally, Zaf has to show up. He will explain that he’s so sorry for what happened to Josephine, but he did what he did because he had some vengeance thing going on and now he’s totally vengeance-free so he’d like her to be his fake girlfriend so that he can track down the people who… wait, didn’t he just say that he’s no longer burning with vengeance?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he said or did, because before I can blink, these two are actually having sex over and over until Josephine realizes that oh my god, he is boinking her while having some shady motivations, but ah, who cares. The whole thing gets wrapped up conveniently where he got his vengeance and his woman, and she also finds closure in the process by confronting a villain that also happens to be involved in his stuff, and… and…
Okay, so this isn’t some “serious” romantic suspense, so maybe I should cut it some slack, but still, the so-called suspense plot is so intertwined with the hero’s motivations and antics that it’s hard not to notice how half baked and half-arsed it is.
The heroine, and now that I think of it, pretty much the whole cast in this one talk in this snappy “like, whatever” way that makes the story feel like a sitcom. This is also an issue because it’s hard to take the plot seriously when these characters are more intent on acting like sassy “Uh huh, you ain’t givin’ me that crap, talk to my hand!” one-liner generators. All that is missing is the canned laugh track.
As a result, I have some difficulties in seeing the main characters as human beings. In fact, I sometimes get this feeling that the author had some key scenes in mind first when she set out to write this thing, and then made up the rest of the plot stuff as filler moments to tie up the scenes together.
Anyway, so that’s it for The Blue Dynasty. I’m still not quite sure what this is supposed to be, but it definitely is neither a halfway decent romantic suspense nor romantic story.
