Elle Boon, $2.99, ISBN 978-1386721789
Romantic Suspense, 2016
In Elle Boon’s Wild and Dirty, our heroine Wren Mikaels has her best day ever when she leaves the club she is working at at 3 am or so, and her car’s brake stops working just as it starts to rain heavily.
Her car flies off the cliff, and this is a great thing because it gives two hot men a chance to rescue her. These men are with the Bowie Baysox, so thank god. We don’t want our heroines to be rescued by accountants or worse, fast food service guys, eeew, after all!
You know, this story barely qualifies as a romantic suspense, and that’s because there are cray crays out there that sabotaged Wren’s brake.
The story, however, feels more like an advertisement than a romance. The romance is basically instant attraction straight to instant whatever else, and the author doesn’t even try to make the dangerous situations feel dangerous.
Wren is already quipping with hero Donovan—whom the author explicitly makes clear from the moment he shows up that his nickname is Van, in case I can’t figure out that Van is Donovan and not a vehicle—when she is rescued, and I can only go, “Sigh, so this is one of those stories, with characters that have only one mood throughout everything: Look at me, haw haw, I’m so witty!”
More significantly, Van’s buddy Alex is everywhere, to the point that I’m wondering whether the author is going to give me a ménage à trois romance here.
Well, no. Instead, the romance of Van and Wren—I know, the author is so cute—becomes a window for the author to show off how awesome Alex and the other Bowie Baysox dudes are, so people, buy, buy, buy, and buy. Even the epilogue is about Van and Wren watching Alex being so awesome on the field. Who cares about this story, as the author has already gotten paid for it, so she’s going to spend the pages of this one telling people to buy the next one!
More annoyingly, the characters are all so shallow.
Wren is just a vehicle to showcase the hunks. As for the guys, for all the “Look at them! These guys are so awesome, so buy their stories, ya!” somersaults and cartwheels performed by the author here, Alex and Van feel indistinguishable and bland.
It’s like trying to tell the difference between this guy and that guy from the same K-pop boyband, only in this case, Van is white and Alex isn’t, and having the race of the guys being the only way to tell them apart is a can of worms I’d rather not open without arming myself with a lot of alcohol first, so let me just stop here.
All this won’t be so bad had this been $0.99, but it’s $2.99! It’s not that long and it’s more of a sequel bait bus than a romance in its own right, so I can’t helping giving it my side eye.
