Absolutely, Positively by Jayne Ann Krentz

Grade: B+

I have a weird fascination with knives. I’m not like Angie who has to carry them all the time or, like, use them sexually on myself or my partner, but I like ‘em. I especially like a man who is good with knives and has cat-like reflexes. I think this is because I used to be in love with those Toshiro Mifune samurai movies, but boy, do I love a man who can wield a knife like it’s a part of his body. Hmm… I wonder if it’s Freudian. I guess this is the reason why I fell absolutely, positively in lust with Harry Trevelyan. There’s a scene early on in this book where he’s trying to convince the heroine to have an affair with him, but a masked man jumps out of nowhere, throws a knife at them, and Harry snatches it right out of thin air. Swoon! The intruder turns out to be Harry’s young cousin merely playing an old carny trick on them, but Harry just acts so damn cool and calm about it that I just drooled all over myself while I read. I also absolutely, positively adore Harry because he’s so damn tortured and broody (his parents were murdered and he could have saved them, but he was just too damn late!), but he’s like… not a dick about it. It’s just a fact of life for him.

Our heroine is Molly Abberwick. Just like Katy in Family Man, Molly’s parents died (though separately) when she was really young, and she was forced to find work, so that she can support herself and her younger sister. Even before then, however, Molly was still the breadwinner of the family (she owns a successful tea and spice shop) because her father was one of those absent-minded inventors who would rather tinker around in their laboratories than find a real job to feed his family! Not to worry, guys, Molly isn’t a “daddy knows best” kind of chick. She loved her father, but she was fully aware of his faults, so she doesn’t habitually make excuses for him to other people (unlike those creepy “I’ll do anything for daddy” heroines). Fortunately, before her dad died, he invented something that was actually useful and the patent had sold for several millions of dollars, which he left in a foundation that doles out grants to future inventors like himself, and Molly is in charge of it. Because Molly does not have the technical know-how that is necessary to make the best decisions about who she should give the grants to, she hires Dr. Harry Stratton Trevelyan, a noted scientist-philosopher, who is the best in the business. Most of the time, Molly is content to leave the decision-making stuff to Harry, but lately Molly has been noticing that he’s been turning down every single grant proposal. Naturally, Molly is pissed because she believes that some of these inventors have really good ideas (oh, come on, Molly, a battery that harvests the energy of the moon?), but Harry is determined to turn them all away. One night, just when she’s about to fire him, he springs a surprise on her that knocks her off of her ass: he is very attracted to her and would like to have a grown-up, no-strings affair with her.

Harry Trevelyan… yummy, yummy Harry. Before he was born, his wealthy socialite mother elopes with his wrong-side-of-the-tracks carny father, which causes Harry’s grandfather to disown her (heeeey… this sounds familiar). This begins the war between the Strattons, who are the richies, and the Trevelyans, who are the carnies. To get away from the familial squabbles, Harry’s parents run away to Hawaii where Harry was born and raised. When his parents are murdered in a botched robbery attempt (they weren’t the robbers, but were in the wrong place at the wrong time), Harry returns to Seattle to reunite with his families, only they’re a bunch of users and manipulators, but Harry indulges them because he wants to mend the fences between the two families. It’s not the greatest arrangement in the world for Harry, however, because the Stratton side of the family wants him to become a corporate drone, while the Trevelyan side of the family wants him to start jumping motorcycles through flaming hoops, but both heavily depend on him to solve their independent problems. Poor Harry. To top it all off, his Trevelyan relatives keep insisting that he possesses the infamous Trevelyan Second Sight, which the scientist in him absolutely refuses to accept because there is no empirical evidence to support it. He can’t deny, however, that he gets mental flashes or “feelings” when he touches emotionally charged objects, but he chalks it up to “insight”. The only thing that seem to make sense in his life is Molly Abberwick even though he knows it is illogical to want her because they have very little in common.

Much like other JAK novels, this—ah, forget it. Read my previews JAK reviews and you will notice a pattern. Yes, they’re all the same, but yes, they’re all good reads. By now, I should have macro for “much like other JAK novels…” because I type it so much. I think this is the last JAK review I will do for a while not because I’m sick of them, but because I have an increasingly growing TBR and should really be trying to tackle them. After all, I have to go back to school in less than a month and won’t have time for re-reads. That makes me sad. When school starts, I probably won’t have time to read anything else but Harlequin Presents because they’re less than two hundred pages. Heck, I might even venture out to Ellora’s Cave and Phaze because they have novellas that are less than fifty thousand words. I’ve never read an e-book before. I would like to submit a manuscript to one of these places, though, so I might as well find out what they’re looking for. I mean, other than threesomes, Asian chicks, and anal sex.

Anyway, what makes this particular JAK novel stand out to me is Harry’s angst. I think he’s the angstiest (is that a word?) of all JAK heroes, because—wait, no, he’s not. That honor belongs to Joel Blackstone. Hmm… so what sets this book apart from the other JAKs? I don’t know. I really enjoyed reading it, though, but I can’t honestly tell you what I liked about it. It’s a little New Age-y for me and there’s lots of mumbo-jumbo about extra-sensory perception and all that psychic stuff, but it’s still a good read. I also usually enjoy the family interactions in these JAK books, but some of Harry’s Stratton relatives were really annoying, and I really wanted to kill that psychologist chick who used to date Harry, but ran away with his cousin, Brandon, instead. I dug the way she described her relationship with Harry, though: “hours of boredom followed by moments of stark terror”. That sounds pretty fun to me. Yep, it must be the knives, then.

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