Unrec: The Killing Room by Gerri Hill
I can't believe I read this book. I can't believe I stayed up late three nights in a row reading this book. I even knew better. I was about fifty pages in when I thought, "I should probably give up on this and read something else," and yet I kept reading. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that I'm so starved for lesbian romance that I will read pretty much anything f/f. I have read one of Gerri Hill's books before (Hunter's Way, I think), and while it wasn't great, I don't remember it being this bad.
Our main characters are Jake and Nicole. Jake is a cop! Nicole is a therapist! Jake's been injured and retreats to her cabin in the mountains while she's on leave. Nicole is burned out and takes a vacation to go hiking in the same mountains. They meet, spend one day exchanging nothing but first names and orgasms, and then part ways. But wait! Jake goes back to work where she's put on a serial murder case where what their victims have in common is their therapist. If you haven't guessed that Nicole is said therapist, you don't read enough books. The connection is still there! They try to be professional! Jake worries about Nicole's safety! Really, am I telling you anything you couldn't guess about the book yourself?
I don't actually object to anything in the basic plot outline. It all sounds like your basic romance novel, and a pretty good time. But it's just not. Let me tell you why not.
Let's start with the least arguable flaw in this book: the point of view issues. I thought this wasn't going to be the kind of book that has pov issues. The first eleven chapters alternate: one chapter from Jake's pov, one from Nicole's. Then they meet. It looks like Hill is changing it up once they meet so instead of whole chapters, we get just alternating sections. That's a perfectly valid choice. Except that's not actually what she's doing. The sections quickly collapse into random pov changes. And not just random changes; badly done random pov changes:Jake shook her head. "I really don't mind the company," she said, surprised that it was the truth. "I'm just going to hang out here today and rest. Tomorrow I'll pack up and head back to my cabin. You're welcome to stay here as long as you like."
Part of her, the polite part, knew that she should be on her way and leave this woman in peace. But the other part, the part that won, wanted nothing more than to hang out here another day and soak in the hot springs. The fact that an attractive woman, an attractive, naked woman, would be sharing those springs didn't hurt. And, the fact that Nicole was even considering that as a reason for staying, startled her.
(The weird comma usage is also true to the original.) It gets worse, though. At one point, we get a few paragraphs of Rick's pov (Rick is Jake's partner on the force) and at another, a few paragraphs of Catherine's (Catherine is Nicole's secretary/friend). I was tempted to make this a "things I would've made you fix in editing" post, but this is such a deep flaw that fixing it in editing would require rewriting the whole book from scratch. I really, really never knew pov was this hard to get right until I started reading more erotica and badly betaed fan fic.
The next flaw is the plotting. It takes way too long (forty-two pages) for Jake and Nicole to meet. If the focus of your story is a romance, start with the romance. Those forty-two pages should have either been collapsed into two chapters (one for Jake, one for Nicole), or dumped all together in favor of starting when Jake and Nicole meet. We could have gotten all of the relevant backstory in just a few paragraphs of internal dialogue once they meet.
If your plot is going to be a mystery as well as a romance, your book should work like a mystery. This book takes way too long to get us to any kind of place where we can start solving the murders, and even then, we don't get enough of the background to figure out who actually did it and why. We get just enough to suspect that the real murderer is involved somehow, but not until about halfway through the book, and we don't get why he did it until just before the final showdown.
The third big flaw I want to talk about is the most subjective one, which I say because although it's done badly, I don't think I would like it even if it were done well. For lack of a better term, let's refer to this aspect as the lesbian politics of the book. For starters, you could change Jake's pronouns to "he" and change only a few details about her body and this would be a straight romance novel. There wasn't anything here to make me think I was really reading about two women. I feel conflicted with condemning this aspect of the book because I do understand that there is such a thing as a butch/femme dynamic that many women identify with and is a real identity for many lesbians, but it's not my thing, not like this, and I'm not entirely sure that's even what this book was doing. It seems to be, because Jake is the butch cop with short hair and Nicole is the semi-closeted professional woman, but Jake only cut her hair because she was in the hospital where it was bothering her and Nicole is actually most comfortable in jeans hiking in the mountains.
You may have noticed the part up there where I said Nicole was semi-closeted. She only dates other semi-closeted professional women, and there's this thing in the book about this whole group of other semi-closeted professional women - They're a group! They have parties and date each other! - that Nicole is a part of. There are two problems with this. First of all, I didn't believe it. I get that this might be the experience of some lesbians, and if the book had come out in the mid-nineties, I might be more likely to go with it, but the book was published in 2006, and I just didn't buy it. The other problem with it is that the group, and especially Dorothy, who is both one of the group's mainstays and Nicole's purported mentor, basically takes the place of disapproving parents, but Nicole isn't invested enough in it for that to work. She's questioning her life even at the beginning of the book, we never see this group as a group that actually wants what's best for her, and it's no surprise when she walks away from them for Jake at the end of the book. Late in the book Nicole learns that Dorothy hasn't been funneling her clients out of the goodness of her heart or a desire to help Nicole build her practice, but because those are the clients who are either about to wash out of therapy or whose insurance has run out. If she'd figured this out a little sooner, Dorothy would have made an excellent red herring for the badly plotted mystery, but even though the reader knows something is a little off about Dorothy from the beginning, Hill doesn't do anything with it and Nicole never really does anything about the way Dorothy's funneled clients to her.
There is also an inexplicable plot point about Rick and his wife splitting up. He says they don't have anything in common and don't even really like each other, but that all the guys were into her and she chose him. It only occurred to me about a week after I finished the book that maybe this is supposed to be a foil for Jake and Nicole's relationship, or some kind of cautionary tale, but even that doesn't make sense. Sure, every woman they meet - lesbian and straight - is totally charmed by Jake, but that's not why Nicole's interested in her. And, yes, the worry about being in different worlds is part of the "conflict" - Nicole's never dated anyone who looks like a lesbian! - but, again, the fact that they like each other and there's a spark there is why they're interested in each other, not the novelty of someone different than their usual type being interested.
I will say one thing for this book, though: the two sex scenes are hot. If you ever run across it in a bookstore or on a misguided friend's shelf, you should just read those. The first one starts on page 62 and the second on page 229.
I do have one more warning that has nothing to do with the writing itself: there is dialogue near the end that graphically (and somewhat dispassionately) describes child abuse, rape, and murder. You might want to stay away if that kind of thing will bother you.
Our main characters are Jake and Nicole. Jake is a cop! Nicole is a therapist! Jake's been injured and retreats to her cabin in the mountains while she's on leave. Nicole is burned out and takes a vacation to go hiking in the same mountains. They meet, spend one day exchanging nothing but first names and orgasms, and then part ways. But wait! Jake goes back to work where she's put on a serial murder case where what their victims have in common is their therapist. If you haven't guessed that Nicole is said therapist, you don't read enough books. The connection is still there! They try to be professional! Jake worries about Nicole's safety! Really, am I telling you anything you couldn't guess about the book yourself?
I don't actually object to anything in the basic plot outline. It all sounds like your basic romance novel, and a pretty good time. But it's just not. Let me tell you why not.
Let's start with the least arguable flaw in this book: the point of view issues. I thought this wasn't going to be the kind of book that has pov issues. The first eleven chapters alternate: one chapter from Jake's pov, one from Nicole's. Then they meet. It looks like Hill is changing it up once they meet so instead of whole chapters, we get just alternating sections. That's a perfectly valid choice. Except that's not actually what she's doing. The sections quickly collapse into random pov changes. And not just random changes; badly done random pov changes:Jake shook her head. "I really don't mind the company," she said, surprised that it was the truth. "I'm just going to hang out here today and rest. Tomorrow I'll pack up and head back to my cabin. You're welcome to stay here as long as you like."
Part of her, the polite part, knew that she should be on her way and leave this woman in peace. But the other part, the part that won, wanted nothing more than to hang out here another day and soak in the hot springs. The fact that an attractive woman, an attractive, naked woman, would be sharing those springs didn't hurt. And, the fact that Nicole was even considering that as a reason for staying, startled her.
(The weird comma usage is also true to the original.) It gets worse, though. At one point, we get a few paragraphs of Rick's pov (Rick is Jake's partner on the force) and at another, a few paragraphs of Catherine's (Catherine is Nicole's secretary/friend). I was tempted to make this a "things I would've made you fix in editing" post, but this is such a deep flaw that fixing it in editing would require rewriting the whole book from scratch. I really, really never knew pov was this hard to get right until I started reading more erotica and badly betaed fan fic.
The next flaw is the plotting. It takes way too long (forty-two pages) for Jake and Nicole to meet. If the focus of your story is a romance, start with the romance. Those forty-two pages should have either been collapsed into two chapters (one for Jake, one for Nicole), or dumped all together in favor of starting when Jake and Nicole meet. We could have gotten all of the relevant backstory in just a few paragraphs of internal dialogue once they meet.
If your plot is going to be a mystery as well as a romance, your book should work like a mystery. This book takes way too long to get us to any kind of place where we can start solving the murders, and even then, we don't get enough of the background to figure out who actually did it and why. We get just enough to suspect that the real murderer is involved somehow, but not until about halfway through the book, and we don't get why he did it until just before the final showdown.
The third big flaw I want to talk about is the most subjective one, which I say because although it's done badly, I don't think I would like it even if it were done well. For lack of a better term, let's refer to this aspect as the lesbian politics of the book. For starters, you could change Jake's pronouns to "he" and change only a few details about her body and this would be a straight romance novel. There wasn't anything here to make me think I was really reading about two women. I feel conflicted with condemning this aspect of the book because I do understand that there is such a thing as a butch/femme dynamic that many women identify with and is a real identity for many lesbians, but it's not my thing, not like this, and I'm not entirely sure that's even what this book was doing. It seems to be, because Jake is the butch cop with short hair and Nicole is the semi-closeted professional woman, but Jake only cut her hair because she was in the hospital where it was bothering her and Nicole is actually most comfortable in jeans hiking in the mountains.
You may have noticed the part up there where I said Nicole was semi-closeted. She only dates other semi-closeted professional women, and there's this thing in the book about this whole group of other semi-closeted professional women - They're a group! They have parties and date each other! - that Nicole is a part of. There are two problems with this. First of all, I didn't believe it. I get that this might be the experience of some lesbians, and if the book had come out in the mid-nineties, I might be more likely to go with it, but the book was published in 2006, and I just didn't buy it. The other problem with it is that the group, and especially Dorothy, who is both one of the group's mainstays and Nicole's purported mentor, basically takes the place of disapproving parents, but Nicole isn't invested enough in it for that to work. She's questioning her life even at the beginning of the book, we never see this group as a group that actually wants what's best for her, and it's no surprise when she walks away from them for Jake at the end of the book. Late in the book Nicole learns that Dorothy hasn't been funneling her clients out of the goodness of her heart or a desire to help Nicole build her practice, but because those are the clients who are either about to wash out of therapy or whose insurance has run out. If she'd figured this out a little sooner, Dorothy would have made an excellent red herring for the badly plotted mystery, but even though the reader knows something is a little off about Dorothy from the beginning, Hill doesn't do anything with it and Nicole never really does anything about the way Dorothy's funneled clients to her.
There is also an inexplicable plot point about Rick and his wife splitting up. He says they don't have anything in common and don't even really like each other, but that all the guys were into her and she chose him. It only occurred to me about a week after I finished the book that maybe this is supposed to be a foil for Jake and Nicole's relationship, or some kind of cautionary tale, but even that doesn't make sense. Sure, every woman they meet - lesbian and straight - is totally charmed by Jake, but that's not why Nicole's interested in her. And, yes, the worry about being in different worlds is part of the "conflict" - Nicole's never dated anyone who looks like a lesbian! - but, again, the fact that they like each other and there's a spark there is why they're interested in each other, not the novelty of someone different than their usual type being interested.
I will say one thing for this book, though: the two sex scenes are hot. If you ever run across it in a bookstore or on a misguided friend's shelf, you should just read those. The first one starts on page 62 and the second on page 229.
I do have one more warning that has nothing to do with the writing itself: there is dialogue near the end that graphically (and somewhat dispassionately) describes child abuse, rape, and murder. You might want to stay away if that kind of thing will bother you.