MIRA, $6.99, ISBN 978-1-55166-469-9
Contemporary Romance, 1999 (Reissue)

Heather Graham Pozzessere’s The di Mecini Bride was first published in 1986. Reading it, this fact shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it sure feels like a relic of that era.

Ah, those were the days, when heroines were lauded for their lack of brainpower and inability to make any rational decision. They were so dumb, but they were big where it counted, and most importantly, they were virgins—everything a man could ever dream of in a woman!

Well, if any word existed aside from “stupid” to describe Christine Tarleton, it probably hasn’t been invented yet.

Let’s see. Based on a flimsy assumption, Chris believes that our hero, Marcus di Mecini, is a murderer. She decides to expose him by playing some flirty harlot in Venice, but then she happens to take a sip of wine and the next thing she knows, or rather, not know as she has completely lost control of her senses, her legs start spinning wide and all over like they are the blades of Airwolf that just can’t wait to land on Marcus’s huge, throbbing… landing pad.

So, when the story opens, she finds herself naked in bed with Marcus, and starts hating herself for somehow sleeping with a murderer. Then, she also decides that maybe he isn’t a murderer, hence proving all those SOBs right when they say that all you need to turn a woman dumb is a dong in her dump.

While she is arguing with herself, she learns that she’s also married to Marcus.

The wine wasn’t even drugged. That’s how remarkable our heroine is. Imagine what happens if she would trip and fall into a vat of wine—she’d probably achieve her final form and become a shoggoth.

Oh, and of all the things our hero can dislike our heroine for, he chooses the fact that she is the daughter of a murderer, something that she has no control over.

I’d think that she’s a murderer’s daughter and he’s a murderer will somehow cancel one another and lead to plenty of hot hate-sex, but no.

What I get instead is a story about figuring out the actual murderer that is only as long as it is because our heroine spends her time reeling from one extreme emotion to another, while our hero refuses to say anything that would have easily halved the length of the whole nonsense. It’s a very frustrating kind of mystery to follow because it takes pace at a glacial pace, powered by the heroine’s stupidity and the hero’s perplexing refusal to be straight up about anything.

What I get is, as expected, the asshole hero whose entire personality can be summed up in two words: “douche” and “bag”. The only nice thing I can say about him is that, well, at least he’s not a whole crate of douchebags, I suppose.

The star of the show, though, is Chris. Really, the reader’s ability to enjoy this thing will hinge heavily on just how much they can tolerate the heroine as she displays an incomparable ability to be so overemotional about everything while also being utterly wrong most of the time, as well as having a complete breakdown when it comes to the ability to make rational decisions or logical deductions.

Then again, the opening scene where she can somehow “accidentally” get herself bedded and wedded without even knowing how she reached that point should be warning enough that one will be super hard pressed to find any intelligent life on the pages ahead.

I probably would have gnawed on this book due to the imbecile running wild on the pages were not for the distractions afforded by the scenery. Just like how people somehow just need to snap their fingers or whistle for a cab to magically drive up in New York City, here people just have to do the same and a gondola somehow shows up, ooh, just like that. I wish I have that much luck with public transport, I tell you.

Then there are all these catacombs in Venice, a fact that sends me online for a good hour or so to find out whether we really do have them over there in real life. So far, my adventures in searching for the answer suggests that there may be some catacombs in Santa Crocel.

Still, I’d take the word of Luigi Fozzati, head of the Archaeological Superintendence of Veneto, when he declared in a National Geographic article:

There are no catacombs in Venice, as the town rises on wood piles in the middle of the saltwater Venetian Lagoon. There is no room for underground chambers or passages, and only a few buildings have a basement.

Okay, so maybe the author did her research on Venice from watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Oh well, I’m sure we all have believed that something in a movie was real at least once in our lives. I thought I could stop time by pressing the tips of my index fingers together after watching that liar of a TV series Out of This World back in those days, so hey, we’ve all been there and done that, and there’s no reason to feel embarrassed. Much.

Oh yes, The di Mecini Bride. Sure, it’s perfectly fine to hunt down the original edition for collection purposes, I’d say, but I’d caution against actually reading it if you are allergic to heroines that push the definition of “stupidity” to its very limits.