GLOW World, $4.99
Romantic Suspense, 2012
Tempting Trouble is the latest installment of Gennita Low’s spy and intrigue romance series. It’s been a long time coming, and thanks to Amazon democratizing DIY publishing so that everyone with enough enthusiasm and determination can play, it’s finally here.
Grace O’Connor, our heroine, is an intern at the Global Network Exchange Consortium (GNE for short). The GNE supposedly provides translation services for foreign entities, and sometimes they handle sensitive matters, especially when the client is a political body. The GNE is more than just a translation firm, however, as Grace will learn when she is taken under the wing of the two GNE head honchos and is practically thrown into her first field work of sorts. It’s a fun case involving surly Chinese politicians, some members of organized crime, and men in nun gambits running around with bombs.
Our hero Lancelot Mercy is on a case, and he just happens upon Grace who keeps showing up whenever there is trouble in most suspicious timing. Good thing he’s not only mean and lean, but he’s also trained in seducing secrets from a woman like Grace. Just when will he realize that Grace is not an enemy?
Tempting Trouble sounds really good on paper. It’s a fast-paced tale of romance and spy intrigue set in a backdrop rarely encountered in stories of this sort. Sex and bullets are always a good, and sexy, mix.
Unfortunately, this story has rapid switches of point of view, often between paragraphs, and I always get distracted when an author does this. Yes, I know, Nora Roberts does this a lot too, which is why I don’t read many books of hers. There is also an odd thing with the epub file I’m writing. The epub file seems to be formatted by two people or something – in the first half, the font size goes from small to big from one chapter to another. I don’t know why. Squiggles, periods, and such sometimes don’t show up properly as well. The PDF format doesn’t have these problems, however.
I also have a hard time getting into the story because the main characters are created to be so awesome, to the point that they become too awesome to be believable. Grace is trained by her spy father and she is also very good with language, gorgeous, and more. It’s the same with Lance – he is basically many glowing adjectives thrown together. Throw in turn of events that often leave me scratching my head – do these two practically make out during their first confrontation, and is it just me or did Lance, the supposedly capable spy, actually blurted out top secret information to Grace in the process? – and I have a story that can be too over the top for me. I feel like the only person in a party that don’t get it while everyone else is having fun.
The suspense part is quite interesting, but the romance goes into physical territory too quickly for any good build up to occur. All in all, Tempting Trouble is a story whose point, I suspect, is one that I keep missing.
