Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86418-8
Romantic Suspense, 2015
Kayla Perrin is pretty awful at writing romantic suspense, and Passion Ignited isn’t going to change that opinion of mine anytime soon. The trouble is that the author has no sense of balance at all – she treats the suspense elements and the sex stuff with equal gravity, hence I get a story in which the two main characters boinking in the bedroom is as important as they trying to save the lives of many people. Someone will get killed? Oh no, we have to… do it doggy style, and then sideways, and then upside down…
This is part of the Love on Fire series, in which some firefighters are trying to nab an arsonist, but don’t worry, this book can stand alone as, as I’ve said, it is just as important to have sex as it is to stop crime, so these people have no problems shagging and pushing the urgency of the situation to the background. You can catch up in no time because the suspense in this one is basically dead on arrival.
As I’ve said, the arsonist is back. Apparently San Francisco has run out of cops, because the public is now insisting that the firemen track down this arsonist and bring that arsonist to justice. Wait, the cops are still here, as our hero mentions them once in a while in the story, but I guess something must have happened while I’m not looking, and now firemen can do cop stuff. I bet in the next book, the author will have these firemen doing FBI stuff! Or maybe Navy SEAL stuff! These men all look alike anyway, who cares as long as they have big penises!
Our heroine, Gabrielle Leonard, is unhappy because her sister is a mean moocher of the family money. How is this relevant to the plot? Who cares, it’s just here to make the heroine look exactly like those heroines with family issues. Her father lost a restaurant to the arsonist, and now the heroine is determined to catch that villain. She’s a TV producer, by the way. so you know she’s armed and dangerous. Okay, she’s walking alone armed with a cell phone to take pictures, but maybe she knows mobile phone kung-fu. She sees a suspicious fellow – she just knows that the guy is funny – so our future profiler of the year gives chase with her mobile phone of death. Stop, arsonist, or she will execute the selfie of doom move!
Oops, she gets tackled by our playboy hero Omar Ewing, the firefighter dude, because he thinks that she is the culprit or something. She tells him that she’s running after an arsonist, and our suave playboy hero of the year makes sexist remarks about her using her breasts and eyelashes to dazzle the arsonist into submission. Gabrielle is offended, and thus, her basement is flooded with the need for Omar to tend to her plumbing ASAP. Oh my god, all that sexist stuff he is saying to her is just so hot. She knows he is player, so she must not succumb… ooh, it’s so big…
These two then proceed to forget that they have an arsonist to groupfie to death, as they lust after one another. Occasionally, they remember they have something to do, and Gabrielle gets some blurry visuals of the arsonist, so she proceeds to organize a witch hunt on her TV station. Have you seen this guy? Kill that bugger, but please wait, Omar wants to do it doggy style with her first. That’s really important. Talking about clichéd family issues and having to deal with skanky evil ex-hos of the hero are really important too, you know.
Speaking of the evil ho-bag plot device, I honestly don’t know why that one crops up so often in Kimani books. Is this line supposed to be targeted at bitter female readers who blame other women for their failed love lives? I suppose reading Kimani books and being told again and again that there are so many evil skanks out there waiting to steal our men from us is cheaper than paying the shrink by the hour, but still, come on now.
Back to this story, finally the author remembers that she has an arsonist to deal with, so she wraps that one up in the most anticlimactic way possible. Our hero and heroine basically have that plot resolved for them while they are busy shrieking about the ho-bags of the world thrusting their saline-loaded breasts between the two of them. The heroine knows that the hero is a player when she spreads them wide for him, but HOW DARE HE HAS AN EX-GIRLFRIEND, oh my god, she will be HURT AND BETRAYED FOREVER, boo-hoo-hoo. The hero knows that she knows he is a player, HOW DARE SHE DOESN’T BELIEVE THAT HE LOVES HER WHEN HE TREATS HER NO DIFFERENT THAN HOW HE TREATS HIS HO BAG, what a bitch, he will show her, he will walk away because SHE DOESN’T DESERVE HIM. What, the arsonist? Who cares? Love sucks, so the world is ending, everything is bleak and dark and we are all going to die.
The only reason this book gets two oogies is because the author has written worse books in comparison. And yes, those books are also supposed to be romantic suspense.
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