Pocket, $12.00, ISBN 0-7434-7671-9
Historical Erotica, 2003
Taboo, a slim and overpriced erotic romance by Kathleen Lawless, has no plot, no character development, just sex. Call me jaded but I am no longer a reader that finds it exciting to read non-stop sexual situations for the sake of sexual situations alone. I need to know who the boinking characters are, or at the very least, there has better be some interesting kinky positions or lurid melodrama if the author wants to do away with plot and character development altogether. But other than a scene involving the hero humping away between the heroine’s breasts (which is nothing extraordinary, actually), the sex scenes here are of the ho-hum “let’s teach a frigid heroine the pumpies” variety.
Fallon Gilchrist (widow to a much older man, scared of her passions, an artist, a complete bore) gets a surprise gift from her female friend: a gigolo named Montague Bridgeman whom this friend Anna purchased from an auction. For one week, the younger man Bridge will service Fallon. Fallon at first just wants to paint Bridge, but he takes off his pants and soon these two are doing it everywhere and anywhere. And that’s it, really. There’s some silly attempt at conflict towards the last few chapters, but it basically revolves around two cardboard characters whining about love. It’s as interesting as cleaning the fridge.
Who is Bridge? Is he a gigolo? Why doesn’t his parents disapprove of his scandalous reputation? All I know is that he doesn’t have much direction in life other than to hump away between women’s legs. Any guy can do that, if given a chance, and since every other hero I come across in a romance novel is the most handsome and most virile man ever, what makes Bridge so special? In this case, nothing. He’s no better than a cutout from a skin magazine. Fallon is the typical inexperienced widow with banked passions – Kathleen Lawless is four years too late as Robin Schone has done this gig four times over by now.
At $12.00 and with only 181 pages, most of them filled with ordinary love scenes between two personality-free cardboard cutouts, this one is a very expensive kind of vanilla. Some readers may like this kind of thing, but personally, I’d recommend taking the $12.00 and getting two actual works of erotica instead. There is nothing remotely Taboo or exciting in this lackluster erotic romance.
