Avon Red, $4.99, ISBN 978-0-06-230484-1
Contemporary Erotica, 2013
For book so bent on bringing on the sexy, Private Research bores me. Either I’m getting way too old for this or the author isn’t delivering. Let’s just peg it in on the author, shall we?
Mina Cavallari once had a thing for Sebastian Graham, until he slept with her roommate (bitchy and ugh, of course, because only the heroine is allowed to be amazing) and invited her to join in so that two becomes three, if you know what I mean. They meet again in London two years down the road when she’s supposed to be doing her PhD while he’s a Pee-Pee in HD. She wastes no time having sex with him, so there is that.
There are still many more pages to be filled, however, so Mina turns out to be another mess who can’t get her act or her finances together, and Sebastian conveniently enough has a job for her – well, it’s not that kind of job, as she does that for free; he would pay her to help him sort out the history of some kind of hot and sexy club that his grandfather used to be in. Did that club survive? Is it true that Justin Bieber is a member? What’s with Zac Efron stripping off his shirt everywhere these days? Not that I disapprove of guys going shirtless at the drop of a hat, it’s just that he looks so much like a plastic doll, I find the whole thing most unappealing.
Oh yes, the story. I feel that the biggest problem here is that the main event – how to PhD that Pee-Pee in HD within ten seconds – happens way too early, and subsequent events feel like filler for the moment when the author gets paid and goes home, so to speak. Things build up way too slowly for my liking, and it doesn’t improve matters that this story is composed of tried and true erotic tropes in such a way that makes the author seem like she’s going through the numbers. The author even has the characters decide to settle back into vanilla once they decide they love one another, making their sexual adventures seem like a fling, something that is “not really them”. For a story already this dull, having all the dullness consigned as some kind of temporary misadventure actually validates my boredom.
And the sexy times at the penultimate moment, supposedly the sexiest things ever, have me yawning. I’m not that heavy an erotica reader, and yet, this one has me thinking that I’ve read far hotter stuff many times before. Maybe it’s those stories with tentacles. Yes, let’s blame everything on tentacles!
Not that it makes Private Research any less uninteresting. I’m way too hot for this jelly.
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