Relay Publishing, $2.99, ISBN 978-1540160379
Contemporary Romance, 2017
The Billionaire’s Ex-Wife is the first entry in Leslie North’s Jameson Brothers series, although the name of the series doesn’t really matter because the author has a few million titles with the word “billionaire” flooding the market already. Is this story different in any way from any other billionaire stories out there? Well, I suppose the names are different, if that counts.
Sam Jameson and his brothers Next Book and The Book After That are all billionaires, having made their money from starting an advertising agency. What? This is a romance novel. Any attractive human with a dangling bit between the legs can start any business and become a billionaire before the week is out. It’s definitely possible.
Anyway, our hero is the COO. Billionaires are either flamboyant or sticks in the mud, and Sam drew the paper with the latter out of the trope goldfish bowl so he’s going to be the sexy sourpuss kind of accountant billionaire. Do all these details matter in the story? Well, not really, but I do need to pad this review or else it’d be only three paragraphs long and people will say I am slacking in my duties.
The plot is about onboarding the third brother, Eddie. You know, the playboy type. The CEO, William, wants Sam to supervise this process, and he also summons Sam’s ex-wife Trinity to help without informing Sam first.
The rest of the story follows a predictable pattern. Sam is an ass, but that’s okay because he’s hot and wealthy and Trinity melts everywhere at the sight of him. Come on, people, let’s be honest: who is going to complain the asshole billionaire when they can get their hands on his money? With all that money, there is no shortage of ways to find happiness elsewhere.
Trinity is actually pretty good in managing Eddie, so much so that I can’t help feeling that these two would make a better couple than she and her ex. However, the author is dead set on forcing our heroine back onto, er, into Sam’s life that the poor heroine as a result comes off like a wobbly pudding hapless to stand up for herself much in the face of Sam being Sam. Because of this, also, Sam ends up being the unwanted anchor that drags the story down considerably.
Also, the author doesn’t dare to give Sam and Trinity any believable reason to divorce in the first place other than “we drifted apart”, so it’s hard to take these people seriously. It’s like they divorced solely because to enable this story to take place, imagine that! This annoying aspect of the story also makes it hard for me to buy the second time happy ending, as both characters never show any convincing character growth to move past whatever it is that caused them to divorce in the first place.
In other words, this story is pieced together from bestselling tropes without much care paid as to whether the tropes go together well. If there were any heart and soul in this story, I don’t really see it. This is one story that exists solely to make the author a lot of money. While there is nothing wrong with that, she could at least take some time to inject some effort to make these tropes feel less tired and stale.
All in all, buy this one if you want to give the author some money. If you want to buy an entertaining story, well, it’s a good thing that there are so, so, so many stories out there with a similar premise—I’m sure a few of them will hit the right spots better than this by-the-numbers effort.
