Love Lane Books, $2.99, ISBN 978-1-78564-174-9
Romantic Suspense, 2019

Lancester Falls is a nice, quiet, peaceful place to be… if you don’t mind the skeleton that Chris Lassiter and a friend stumbled upon as the lake dries up. So, we have a mystery as well as a romance developing between Chris and the cop, Sawyer Wiseman, and the author sort of gives away a big chunk of the suspense in the first chapter, when Sawyer tries to get his boss to look into possible corruption involving the mayor, and the guy is all forget-you-loser to him in response. Ladies and gentlemen and whatever flavors of gender you identify as, welcome to What Lies Beneath, the first entry in the Lancester Falls series.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with romantic suspense, mostly because many authors dabbling this genre frequently mess up the precarious balance between romance and suspense. Often, the suspense is either drowned by the romance, or the series quickly devolves into a “gotta catch ’em all”-style books of almost superhero, indestructible action heroes wagging their pee-pees around while doing bodyguard duties to some sassy damsel in distress. This main issue with this one is the former, rather than the latter.

That’s right, these characters spend way too much time gazing at their navels as well as the other person’s, constantly prattling about fee-fees and the wah-wahs that complicate their pee-pee action. It’s not even exciting fee-fees. Chris comes off as complete weirdo: the author uses Chris being a horror writer as an excuse to justify that character acting in ways no sane people likely will, such as getting excited about finding a skull and practically rushing to explore rickety old houses when he knows that there may be danger abound. That character ends up being a sociopath with little empathy for other people. At the same time, the author also has Sawyer constantly iterating that Chris is a good guy–show me, don’t tell me please, because right now I see a creep, not a good guy, on the pages—and how this makes him feel blue because that means Chris is too good for a tumble.

Maybe I’m just being a sexist, stereotyping pig, but I can’t imagine any single guy, straight or gay or whatever, moaning over how they simply can’t play sexy games with a willing, hot, available person when the opportunity arises because it makes his fee-fees rumble. Heck, I wouldn’t say no, should a hot guy asks me if I want that kind of ride, because pee-pees first, fee-fees can wait or go hang later.

There’s just way too much of this inconsequential navel-gazing over boring fee-fees that this story soon slows into a boring crawl by the mid-point of the whole thing. Adding to the tedium is how the story alternates from Sawyer’s and Chris’s points of view, but they both sound like the same guy. Reading this thing is like watching RJ Scott trying to be a ventriloquist with a puppet on each lap, only to do a pretty dire job in how each puppet has the same voice, if I am making sense here. The only distinguishing traits between the two men is that one is that kind of weirdo that stands by the fruit punch at the party and causes everyone else to go thirsty because they suspect he may have slipped something into the drink, while the other one is a boring Eeyore afraid that his wee-wee may get his fee-fee hurt.

I don’t think RJ Scott is a bad writer, at least not from what I read here. It’s just that the execution is way off. Perhaps this one will be better if it had been narrated from a single person’s point of view and, more importantly, it is about suspense as much it is about the moping and sighing. The romance here has zero chemistry, because the two characters are too busy posturing—when it comes to love and especially sex, I can only roll up my eyes and think that Chris and Sawyer are more like the fantastical idealization of men by a teenage girl that has never formed many relationships with men before, as opposed to, you know, real men. Now that I think of it, maybe the author should have just written something else, as What Lies Beneath is such a technical misfire that I don’t know how it can be salvaged as a romantic suspense.