No Ordinary Man, by Suzanne Brockmann
I enjoy Brockmann’s fat action-romances about Navy SEALs and FBI agents. I’ve only read a few of her slim category romances, but so far, with the exception of Harvard's Education, they’ve been much weaker. This one tips over into terrible. Unfortunately, even Brockmann’s bad books have the capability of making me turn pages, so I read the whole thing.
Single mom Jess rents out an apartment to mysterious tenant Rob - when a serial killer who matches his description is stalking women who look just like her! This functions as a decent work of romantic suspense with some genuine mystery as to who the real killer is. Since this isn’t a Gothic, it’s definitely not Rob. Though Brockmann momentarily had me going on that count until they slept together. In category romance, the heroine cannot have sex with the murderer during the course of the book.
What ruined the book was that the only factor arguing against Rob’s guilt was the genre convention that the hero of a romance novel cannot also be the villain. But since Jess doesn’t know she’s in a romance novel, when she is confronted with a mountain of evidence pointing to Rob’s guilt, Rob ends up on the run from an FBI manhunt, the FBI agents tell her for God’s sake to call them if she sees him, and she reacts by saying that he can’t possibly be guilty because her intuition says he’s innocent and then hides him from the cops, I couldn’t help hoping that he would turn out to be guilty and kill her.
There’s an explanation for Rob’s incredibly suspicious actions and all the physical evidence against him, but it’s a bit ridiculous. I was not even won over when Jess personally beat up and captured the real killer, which normally would be a big plus for me. I don’t usually say this, but the heroine of this book was truly too stupid to live.
Single mom Jess rents out an apartment to mysterious tenant Rob - when a serial killer who matches his description is stalking women who look just like her! This functions as a decent work of romantic suspense with some genuine mystery as to who the real killer is. Since this isn’t a Gothic, it’s definitely not Rob. Though Brockmann momentarily had me going on that count until they slept together. In category romance, the heroine cannot have sex with the murderer during the course of the book.
What ruined the book was that the only factor arguing against Rob’s guilt was the genre convention that the hero of a romance novel cannot also be the villain. But since Jess doesn’t know she’s in a romance novel, when she is confronted with a mountain of evidence pointing to Rob’s guilt, Rob ends up on the run from an FBI manhunt, the FBI agents tell her for God’s sake to call them if she sees him, and she reacts by saying that he can’t possibly be guilty because her intuition says he’s innocent and then hides him from the cops, I couldn’t help hoping that he would turn out to be guilty and kill her.
There’s an explanation for Rob’s incredibly suspicious actions and all the physical evidence against him, but it’s a bit ridiculous. I was not even won over when Jess personally beat up and captured the real killer, which normally would be a big plus for me. I don’t usually say this, but the heroine of this book was truly too stupid to live.