HubBooks Literary Services, $0.99
Romantic Suspense, 2011
I start to wonder about Sylvia Hubbard’s Red Heart when, within a single chapter, hero Stephen Heart’s sister Kasey way of committing suicide changes from a shot between the eyes – do people commit suicide like that? – to suicide by overdose. Since this thing was published in 2011, that means nine years had passed without anyone taking note of and quietly changing this boo-boo in the published digital product.
Stephen and Jode never did move to third base when they were younger, but the fact that they had gone as far as they did forms the basis of this romance between them. Certainly this story has no time to develop the romance in the present, as these two are too busy accusing one another of enabling dead Kasey’s drug habit when they aren’t doing some lame investigation into Kasey’s death. Kasey is very helpful – she left behind an open trail of notes and clues to such a degree that I can only wonder how inept her killers are not to have found and destroyed all the evidence sooner. This helps the mystery be solved pretty quickly, but it also means that the mystery is as interesting as watching people play join the dots.
Finally, these two profess that they are in love, and I can only wonder how that happened. Flashbacks aren’t the same thing as falling in love, and if everyone marries the person they made out with once upon a time, I suspect there are going to be many unhappy people walking around as a result. Worse, even if the romance is quite the dud, the mystery is nowhere as interesting or entertaining to make up for this.
I feel that Red Heart may have been a better romance if it had been straight up romance. Kasey died of an overdose, and with Stephen and Jode blaming themselves as well as the other person for not helping Kasey sooner, the resulting read could have been a hard-hitting, emotional one. Instead, I get a story that is both half-baked romance and half-baked suspense. Half of ugh plus half of ugh is still an ugh, all things considered.
