Arabesque, $6.99, ISBN 1-58314-347-5
Contemporary Romance, 2002
If the heroine Raven Christopher is any more pathetic in Stolen Hearts, she will be a spineless protoplasmic green thing oozing slime all over the bathroom floor. The villain of this story wants this weepy, indecisive, can’t-do-crap-without-my-man primordial slime brain to steal an artwork for him. That makes him as big an idiot as the heroine. Our hero Andre Simon spends the whole book either hating or angry-sexing our heroine – not too hard on that heroine, dear, I don’t think she can afford to lose any more brain cells – so he’s an idiot too. Everyone’s an idiot in this story. Aliens must have come in and stolen their brains (and in the heroine’s case, her entire spinal cord as well), not hearts.
A long time ago, Raven Christopher is pathetically in love with Andre Simon – until he learns that she is a thief and, even if she is a misunderstood thief, he ditches her, doesn’t answer her calls, and when she shows up screeching that she has a secret baby of theirs and she needs his help, he slams the door on her face. Then he remembers that she is hot and ditching the sexy Other Woman from his, er, arms, he decides to go see Raven and see if she’s still the same dumb doormat as before.
His feelings from her swing from insane mistrust to insane justification of her stupidity, depending on whether we need 50 or 1,000 pages of big misunderstanding nonsense to pad a particular chapter. The heroine just cannot do anything without bungling up big time and going eek-eek-eek pathetically, and the thought of her raising the secret baby from hell on her own fills me with pity for poor little Julian.
I can go on and on about the inept plot and irrational characters in Stolen Hearts, but I think this brilliant line from the book sums up how unbelievably stupid this book is. This line is the hero’s typical, lumbering train of thought, by the way, which proves that stupidity isn’t just restricted to the heroine in this story.
How could she even consider stealing such a valuable piece of artwork?
