Leisure, $6.99, ISBN 0-8439-5159-1
Paranormal Romance, 2004

Sandra Hill’s Wet & Wild, featuring another dumb oversexed 11th century Viking sent to present day – in a SEAL training camp, of all places! – is really very little on plot, heavy on sex, and the humor is, for me, getting old because Ms Hill is still plying the same old oversexed-hero frigid-heroine shtick that she offers in virtually every one of her previous books.

Ragnor Magnusson, another violent bloodthirsty Viking fellow that Ms Hill tries to make palatable by telling me that so far if he’s a marauding fellow razing villages and killing people, look at him, he acts like a teddy bear! A teddy bear with a rampant erection waiting to stick it to anything that moves, but a teddy bear nonetheless. Ms Hill doesn’t even bother with time-travel dynamics anymore – woosh, one minute Ragnor is pillaging innocent folks’ homes (but he’s big and cute and he wants to stick it to you, so really, he’s adorable!) and the next minute he is mistaking Lt Alison MacLean as a strumpet. This is a common shtick in this author’s stories and for variety’s sake, lucky Alison gets to be called “dock-whore” by the adorable rapine-murdering but still cute Viking dude.

Characterization is barely there. Ragnor’s characterization extends as far as the inches of his prodigious erection. Alison, despite being a doctor in the SEAL camp, has only two defining characteristics: she is grieving over her dead boyfriend and she, as Ragnor insists, is desperately in need of getting laid. There are plenty of sex and jokes often at the heroine’s expense, some out-of-place terrorist subplot that seems distastefully cartoonish at times, and… er, nothing else, really.

High on buffoonery and low on substance, Wet & Wild leaves me high and dry. Ms Hill really needs to vary her repertoire a little one of these days.