Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86307-5
Contemporary Romance, 2013

Maybe it’s the heat, as right now it’s like sitting in an oven at my part of the world, but I find myself strangely hypnotized by the cover. I don’t know why. The guy is badly cut and pasted in a clumsy manner over a tacky backdrop. Oh right, I think I know why: that sunken chest. I wonder whether the model has pectus excavatum.

Anyway, let’s move to the story beyond the cover. Monica McKayhan’s Kimani debut Tropical Fantasy—and her only book in that line, as she writes under the name Monica Richardson for her next few books—follows the playbook faithfully.

Our workaholic Sasha Winters, with a constantly disapproving mother, goes to Bahamas to attend her sister’s wedding. There, we have four items on the Kimani must-do-or-die list ticked off already.

She encounters Vince Sullivan, who is the groom’s friend, and naturally sparks fly. So, now we have six items ticked off already.

They know one another already, as she hit his car with hers and she accused him for making a big deal out of it. After all, couldn’t he lick his finger and run it over the scratch? What, he expected her to be accountable for her mistake? She. a modern independent career woman, to be held accountable? Oh, the nerve! So, he calls her a workaholic and she sniffs at him in disdain even as she secretly feels wobbly down there at the thought of him ramming her again this time, but not with his car.

So far, so good. Sure, the whole thing feels like Kimani Story Line #4 playing out yet again like a broken record, but the author’s narrative is polished and there is a snappy bounce to the prose that I find myself liking.

Then come the problems. Oh my goodness, the drama. It’s not that Sasha and Vince have some internal conflicts going. In fact, their romance is pretty smooth going all things considered. No, it’s everything else. Her sister deliberately gets herself pregnant, despite knowing that the man she is going to marry doesn’t want kids so soon, because she wants a brat now and he’d have to be okay with it. Yes, that always works well, entering a marriage expecting the partner to just bend over backward and change. Sasha’s mommy drama escalates, as does her workplace drama (the usual—icky smarmy colleague wanting to upstage her and she wanting to prove herself). Vince’s friend Taj cheated on his wife and this for some reason makes Vince wary of committing to a relationship. And so forth.

While not all the drama escalates into pure soap opera hour, the fact that the author keeps bringing all kinds of issues and crisis makes reading this story more like sitting in a room while the fire alarm rings every few minutes. The poor hero and heroine can’t seem to catch a breather before some kind of drama or issue is raised.

I can’t help thinking of Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote and how a trail of dead bodies follows her everywhere she goes. Perhaps there is some kind of eldritch curse laid on Sasha and Vince, which compels everyone around them to create drama and raise the stress level?

There is just too much drama here, and not enough quiet times to allow the relationship between the hero and the heroine to develop at a more natural pace. In the end, I can’t help feeling that the author’s style and voice are wasted on Tropical Fantasy.