2013 romance novella. Nikki is an unsuccessful artist in the process
of giving up on her dreams by taking a marketing job; Mark is the
private detective whose office she walks into by accident. But it
seems he needs some help catching an art thief…
The writing is shaky at times, but the book has drive. Both Mark
and Nikki have lust-at-first-sight for each other; but both of them
have had problems with lust-at-first-sight before, that stop them from
simply leaping into each other's arms, and that's frankly more
plausible than the standard romance trope of Big Misunderstandings
that delay the principals' realisation of what is obvious to everyone
else.
The standard romance trope of the Psycho Ex does show up, to a
thoroughly disconcerting degree; if anything I found it a bit
overdone, because we're expected to believe that one of our
protagonists could have been seriously in love with this person who's
clearly fairly mad. It just about holds together, mostly by putting
the Psycho Ex on stage with their new rival rather than with the old
partner.
This is an unusual romance in that the principals get roughly equal
time as point of view characters; that's a much tougher job than
writing exclusively from inside one person's head, and I applaud Wolfe
for trying – and succeeding, as they come over with quite different
mental voices.
This is not a well-researched book. The police procedure is
implausible and probably borrowed from crime shows, and it's not
really clear just how Mark became a detective even after it's been
explained. And Wolfe appears to think that Amsterdam is in Iceland.
But the basic emotional connection is what's at the core of the book,
and that does work.
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