Grade: B+

You can tell that I’m feeling a little blue when you see me reading Jayne Ann Krentz. The lady was a staple in my adolescent TBR. The polar ice caps may be melting, the dead may be coming back to life to eat our brains, and our president may be a cyborg sent from the future to destroy civilization as we know it, but Jayne Ann Krentz will be writing the same damn story over and over for the rest of of her life. But who gives a shit. When you’re reading a JAK, you know you’re going to get quality: sparkling dialogue, sizzling sexual tension, a strong heroine, a brooding hero with green eyes, and lots of shenanigans. Sure, if you’ve read one JAK, you’ve read them all, but it’s kind of like watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You’ve seen it a hundred times, you can call out the lines, you can act out the scenes… but damn, it’s always a good time. This particular JAK piece is a little bit Family Man with a healthy spoonful of The Golden Chance for flavoring. Hero is a black sheep, but is also the most responsible one in a flighty, profligate family; though heroine is suspicious of him, she is sexually attracted to him, but insists there will be no sexin’ as it will complicate matters (they have sex anyway); heroine is steadfast in her defense of the hero to his suspicious family even though she doesn’t trust him herself; main conflict stems from deep dark secret involving either family. See? Good times. Lady is like chicken soup. You know what you’re gonna get and she always goes down easy (can also said for a five-dollar whore, but you guys… JAK charges 7.99 for her MMP, thank you).

Angie Townsend is the only artist in a melodramatic, loving, but nonetheless business-driven family. The family business is Townsend Resorts and Angie is often kept out of the loop because they don’t think she’d be interested. Which is why when she meets Owen Sutherland, falls in love with him, and marries him three months later, she doesn’t realize that their wedding is also a deal-sealer for the merger of Townsend Resorts and Sutherland Hotels, of which Owen is the CEO. Angie luuuuurves Owen and is convinced Owen lurves her back and who cares if he hasn’t said the three-little-words. After the wedding, the two of them flee to Santa Barbara to stay at a Sutherland Hotel for their honeymoon and just as the two of them are getting ready to do it, Angie receives a copy of a press release slid under the door of their hotel room, which tells her of an impending merger between Townsend Resorts and Sutherland Hotels. She also gets a mysterious phone call telling her that Owen is going to divorce her after the merger goes through and then ruin Townsend Resorts in a hostile takeover for revenge… REVENGE! She tells Owen she won’t have sex with him until she’s sure of his feelings for her and Owen vows not to try to sex her up unless she begs.

Angie is sufficiently feisty. She’s a vintage JAK heroine. She loves her family. She’s zany. She’s wacky. She’s understanding like Mother Earth. She doesn’t take shit from Owen. She reacts with a level-head to every situation and doesn’t keep secrets from Owen that will lead to any stupid misunderstandings later on. Owen, on the other hand, is a take-charge kind of guy whom everyone believes to be a cold fish. He insists that the marriage has nothing to do with the merger, but smart guy that Owen is, he know it will be advantageous PR-wise if the wedding just happened to coincide with the merger. To his credit, he does seem to honestly care about Angie and he actually listens to her. I love the two of them together, especially when they’re just talking. I love that the JAK couples are true partners that neither party is dominant to the other. It may appear that Owen is the stronger character, but Angie is also pretty good at manipulating him into doing what she wants (vintage JAK heroine trait). Anyway, there’s plenty of chemistry and sexual tension between the two of them and I enjoyed reading about the two of them work through their problems.

Of course no JAK is complete without wacky relatives and boy, we got ‘em here all over the place, especially since Owen shanghais Angie to his family’s private island to keep her from talking to the press. I swear to God, if they were wacky matchmaking relatives, I wouldn’t be able to stand them, but really, they’re mostly in place for the drama. In a JAK novel, they’re usually a pack of greedy, narcissistic spoiled brats taking advantage of the hero’s sense of charity, while castigating him at all times and talking crap behind his back to the heroine. The hero keeps them around, mostly because under his cold-fish exterior, he really is a kind and noble man whose family means a lot to him even though they’re a pit of vipers. It’s no different in this book. What makes them all fun is how soap-opera they are. We’ve got the dotty older relatives who are always whining about the hero not running the company the way his father did, the bitchy sister who says catty things to the heroine and somehow lands a nice guy who is an ally to the heroine and makes the hero jealous, and the matriarch who is forever airing out her suspicions about the hero and says shit like, “It wouldn’t have been like this if your father were still around.” Anyway, they make things melodramatic and can only be called matchmakers in a sense that they push the hero and the heroine together by generally being assholes and making the heroine get defensive about the hero. It just wouldn’t be a JAK novel without them. See also dotty, melodramatic neighbors.

I had a lot of fun reading this book, mostly because I know what to expect from Jayne Ann Krentz. It’s all so familiar, yet somehow it never gets old. I think it’s just part of the charm and why she remains so popular even though she has been writing the same story for about twenty years now. Angie and Owen are a good fun couple with plenty of heat together and solid bantering. The secondary characters are fun to read about, too. It’s just a nice, pleasant read all around. Check it out if you’re looking for something classic, but not expecting to be blown away.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Contempo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.