Ellora’s Cave, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-4199-1612-0
Romantic Suspense Erotica, 2008

Warning: English teacher mode ahead.

All she really understood was that she wasn’t going to marry any man who didn’t demand her and so far all the carefully approved young men her and aunts had invited to dinner did nothing to heat up her pussy.

Huh? While I’m not your everyday nitpicking English teacher, I wonder whether the word “demand” is used correctly in that sentence.

The biggest obstacle to me enjoyment of Point of Combustion is the author’s writing style. She loves using short abrupt sentences that creates a staccato bullets-firing effect whenever I read them. That isn’t so bad were not for the fact that these sentences tend to repeat the same thing over and over for a few paragraphs each time.

Mia Kerstin is a 24-year-old Korean American young lady who lives a double life. With her parents, she’s a sweet and agreeable young woman. But she also loves to dance the night away and what she really wants is a hot guy that excites her enough to surrender her virginity to him. Never in her wildest dreams though would she imagine that fellow to be night club owner/secret agent fellow Trace Kocourek. Trace is watching over her to make sure that the bad guy doesn’t get Mia – it’s a long story related to a previous book called Challenge Protocol. Let’s just say that her friend is in trouble with some really bad guys and she has asked Trace to keep Mia safe in case these bad guys hit out at Mia to get back at her. Mia isn’t the most cooperative person around, so Trace knocks her out and drags her to his Batcave, so to speak, for her own good.

While the writing becomes less repetitious and flows more smoothly in the late third or so of the story, the early parts are hard for me to get into because I don’t like the repetition, the choppy sentences, and the occasional oddly used word like “demand” in the sentence I highlighted earlier in this review. I don’t have a problem with the author’s style when she is writing as Mary Wine, so I can only surmise that this is due to the author affecting a deliberately different writing style as Dawn Ryder that doesn’t appeal to me. That or this is the result of the author having different editors.

The story itself is okay. There is nothing too deep here, just a randy woman and a randy man getting it on and on and on while a superficially developed suspense subplot provides some semblance of plot to the proceedings. I just prefer to read something else that is more interesting.