West of Mars\' Rocks \'n Reads

I absolutely hate it when I sit down with a book and devour it, only to be derailed with a hundred pages left by bad plotting, a choice by the main character that takes all sympathy away from me, and other stupid stuff. Like obvious editorial input that the bad guy was too obvious, so they author ought to switch it up to the dude we’ve had no reason whatsoever to suspect.

That was my experience with Lynn Abercrombie’s The Body Box.

Hell, it’s even packaged wrong. The back cover copy promises a story featuring a truly sick protagonist. Think Criminal Minds, ramped up.

We rarely get to see his side of things. Instead, we are handed a pretty basic, although initially good, police
procedural. So good that I sat around at Boy Scout camp, up in Leader Land, and devoured the book. It wasn’t until I got home and hit that mark of about the last 100 pages that the small benders main character Mechelle Deakes became too much of an issue.

Yes, benders. This book is full of cliches of the genre, although they mainly work. Which means Mechelle is a recovering addict. Her first fall off the wagon was a bit bothersome. Her second made me uneasy. But her third, complete with a digression of her character into someone she’s clearly disdained up until this point, made me lose it with this book.

I hate it when a book sits around my house for years, waiting to be read, and then leaves me so cold at the end. Especially when it was so good for the first two thirds.

Lynn Abercrombie is a pseudonym for someone else. When sitting under the trees, book in hand, I was excited to find out who else she is. Now that I’m home and aggravated by those last hundred pages, forget it.

***
Disclaimer garbage: I picked this up through BookCrossing ’cause it looked good. Shows you what sort of judgment I have. I wasn’t even compensated for those last 100 pages.

Hot on the heels of Seduced: The Unexpected Virgin came Rachel Bailey’s Million-Dollar Amnesia Scandal. The April 2011 books at Silhouette Desire were full of music fiction.

Well, okay, only two out of six (as far as I know). But that’s a full one-third. It’s got to mean something, right?
While I was disappointed in the portrayal of the music details in Seduced: The Unexpected Virgin, I most certainly wasn’t in Million-Dollar Amnesia Scandal. Perhaps that’s in part due to the main character, April Fairchild, and her amnesia.

Let me explain: the set-up for Million-Dollar Amnesia Scandal is that April has lost her memory and seems to have
woken up in legal possession of a hotel. Seth Kentrell wants the hotel back.

That’s the backbone of the story. The fact that April is a world-famous jazz singer is totally secondary to the story — and that is exactly why the musical elements here work. Not to mention they seem authentic. It’s easy to buy April’s deep-seated love of playing piano, and it’s easy to relate to someone who feels a pull to something, who has half-remembered memories but can’t conjure up the other half and, thus, complete the picture. She honestly has no idea why she has woken up as a hotel owner, but she knows this particular hotel means something pretty darn special.

At it’s heart, Million-Dollar Amnesia Scandal is a romance, and Seth and April make a great pair. They are both likeable people, and maybe more importantly, they are both reasonable people. There are no lies, no accusations flung around, no wild goose chases they send each other on. April has something Seth wants, and he goes about figuring out how to get it in a very straight-forward manner.

Overall, I liked this book. So why did it take me two months to review it?

Because at the end of the day, it wasn’t particularly memorable. It was quick candy, nice to fill a day with, but not something I’d tell the whole world to go read. If you need a book to take with you on an airplane, this one is it.

(Disclosure: I nabbed a copy of this from PaperbackSwap.com. I’m hoping to send it back out into the world via PBS, but we’ll see how it goes on to a new reader. Could be BookMooch. I could hand it off. Who knows? That’s half the fun of it all.)