Sweet River Publishing, $3.99, ISBN 979-8201973483
Contemporary Romance, 2021
In the very opening paragraph of April Murdock’s The Billionaire’s Heart, I can tell that the author doesn’t waste any time or words.
I could tell something was going to happen as soon as I walked into the restaurant and saw Loukas, Silas, Zachary, and Tanner already sitting at the table, drinks in hand looking smug with themselves. There wasn’t one time I could think of when my cousin Loukas Mikos had arrived early or even on time for anything. He was known for being a party animal and age hadn’t changed him. As I walked over to them seated at a glass round table in the middle of New York’s newest restaurant, Zolo, they all lifted their drinks and cheered.
Buy, buy. buy all their books!
These are all billionaires, by the way, and they are just 30 or so. I know, count them—one, two, three…—five billionaires at a table in a same town, all around 30 and look hot too.
Are they billionaires because we are counting in yen or something?
Anyway, the entire first chapter are devoted to these guys explaining things that they should already know to one another for the sake of the reader, and it’s all awkward as can be. It also doesn’t help that these guys don’t talk like guys… or gals, for the matter. They talk like exposition dumpers, shudder.
“I’ve been busy with work. You know what it’s like. We’re all successful here. We work incredibly hard and we don’t have time to be hanging out with the guys every day.” I looked at them hoping they’d add some perspective to their position.
I hope people aren’t placing bets that the hero, Adam Nicolis, is going to be actually busy in the rest of this story. He’s a romance novel billionaire, the money probably just comes out every day from his rear end whenever he does a number two, because he sure doesn’t work like a real billionaire.
Adam’s wife has thoughtfully died, giving worthless heroines with a lack of ability to better themselves a chance to have at him. He also has a daughter to pawn off to the heroine later devote his time to, and I’m sure we all know where this is heading.
Our heroine, Zoe Ross, is a divorcée whose only ambition in life is to have a family. See, see? So typical. Sadly, her ex-husband’s unworthy seed failed to do the necessary, but maybe Adam’s billion-dollar-flavored one will do the trick.
Oh, and she’s so adorable and kooky, or so the author hopes.
“Of course, I paid for parking, dear. Do you think I’m a hick who doesn’t know how things work?”
“I’m just saying because the last time we came to the city, you forgot to pay for parking because it was one of those machines that asked for the license plate number and you couldn’t remember it. I just don’t want us to get another ticket.” My mom was always the worrier in the family. She didn’t mean to second guess my dad; she just couldn’t help it as it was in her nature. Thankfully after forty years of marriage he knew well enough to just roll with it.
I can hear the canned laugh track in my head already.
Oh, and she’s utterly aimless and really, she has no ambition aside from spreading her legs and shooting a baby out into the waiting arms of a gynecologist.
When I graduated from beauty school, my mom found an advertisement online for a company that hired all the staff for luxury cruise liners, and they were hiring for makeup artists. I applied simply to please my mom and was completely surprised when they called me a week later to schedule an interview. Three weeks had passed since then, and here I was ready to start my new job doing the makeup for the performers in the nightly musical shows. Not exactly glamourous, but better than I thought my first job would be. And maybe I’d have some fun when I wasn’t working.
Needless to say, these two meet at the cruise ship and she displays her uses as a babysitter by bonding with that brat of his. He’s attracted by her hotness and the fact that this is one guileless and ambition-free woman that will never have enough brain cells to dupe him out of his money.
It could be the start of a new and wonderful relationship, but I get vexed when the author keeps interrupting the quiet moments between these two for the hero to introduce everyone to his friends. I get it, I get, the author wants to make a lot of money by making her readers buy every thing in every series of hers, but this only disrupts any momentum of the relationship the moment it threatens to get going.
So, what passes for a romance is constantly interrupted by Adam having these long internal monologues about his friends’ background and personal lives like they are the ones he wants to marry or something, when he’s not showing them around to secondary characters. Best of all, these scenes do nothing to the main romance. They are just interminable advertisement breaks interrupting the show that I’m tuning in for.
Then comes the utterly boring “conflicts”. Zoe is jealous of some woman that dares to talk and interact with Adam like a normal human being.
Adam—wait, the hero’s name is Adam, right? There are so many men showing up to tell me to buy their stories that I sort of lost track.
Oh yes, his name is Adam.
Adam needs Zoe to pretend to be his girlfriend to throw off that woman Zoe is jealous of, because as a billionaire, Adam has no power to just tell someone to get out of his face or he’d make a few phone calls to ensure that the woman would never find another job outside of OnlyFans ever again… and then, he’d buy that platform to make sure she can’t even be on it. No, no, Mr Billionaire has to come up with stupid games instead.
Anyway, this is a pretty painful read. It’s annoying enough that the author can’t quit on inserting sequel baits every few pages for no purpose other than advertising, but she also has her characters talk like exposition dump machines. These characters tend to also over-explain and over-analyze everything until something that could have been sufficiently covered in a few paragraphs end up drenching half to an entire chapter in Byzantine explanations and monologues.
Things get further bogged down when the author also adds in all the exposition dump on the various sequel baits’ hotness, love lives, background, et cetera to the point that what is supposed to be a romance of two people plus a brat ends up becoming a pointless ensemble story in which the rest of the cast contribute nothing to the plot aside from pages after pages of filler.
Oh, and the idiotic fake girlfriend plot also kills any chances of fun happening in this thing. The hero is a flaky dolt, the heroine is a clueless dingbat with forced and awkward cheeriness and a sole ambition to be a brood mare, and the brat often acts and speaks like she’s actually a midget woman in her forties pretending to be a child. Wait, I’ve seen that slasher movie before…
All in all, The Billionaire’s Heart resembles something closer to a word that rhymes with “heart” but emerges from the billionaire’s rear end instead. Seriously, can the author just chill with the desperate “Buy all my books now!”-itis of hers and focus on telling a story?
