Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86511-6
Contemporary Romance, 2017
Rafe Lawson, the son of a senator, is content with living it up on the fast lane in the last sixteen or so years. Wine, women, bikes… and then he meets Secret Service agent Avery Richards and he’s a changed man. He woos her, pursues her, and late in the story, he’s all oh yeah, my dad hates your dad, let’s cuddle muah muah muah, and some dramatic stuff happens before we get the happy ending.
That’s Donna Hill’s Surrender to Me in a nutshell. I normally enjoy this author’s stories – especially her early books for the then-called Arabesque line, but this is so nondescript that, when I finish this thing, I actually wonder, “Wait, did I just read something?” I can’t remember much about the actual details in this story, because for a long time, it’s just a hot guy and a hot woman leisurely chatting and doing nice things in a vaguely pleasant but completely forgettable way. He’s another one of the many playboy Kimani heroes, she’s another one of those heroines who seem to be just there, and there is nothing interesting happening for a long time. When things do happen, half of them are already revealed in the back cover synopsis. Not that I blame the person who wrote that thing – if that person had to be honest, that back cover synopsis would be just like this paragraph. Things happen… things… whatever they are… who cares, really.
What else can I say? This book is okay, but for the life of me, I don’t recall much of the story and, worse, I don’t feel bad about that. Surrender to Me is like the most average kind of one night stand: it may scratch an itch for a few seconds, but seriously, anyone could have served just as well for that purpose. Donna Hill should have been better than that, but I suspect the fault lies more in the people steering the Kimani line to the iceberg.
Whatever, dead line, forgettable book. Moving on is never this easy.
