I didn’t expect anything of this book except that the excerpt intrigued me, so to discover a gem like this was a wonderful surprise. I love how you played with both the Cinderella fairytale and the old skool Harlequin Presents tropes and came up with something so powerful and good.

Tom is an auto-mechanic. Or not even that? Tom works at a quickie lube joint (no, not that kind). He’s a year out of a relationship with Wells, a pampered scion of a rich family who seems to like slumming. Wells disappeared one day and Tom only found out later that he’d been left for a woman. The story opens when Well’s cousin Law pulls up in his Lamborghini Diablo and offers to take Tom to Well’s wedding reception. Law is huge, filthy rich, invincibly powerful — all the requirements for a Harlequin Presents dominant asshole male. Tom doesn’t know what Law’s motivation is, but Tom sees it as an opportunity for revenge, for final closure, and he agrees to go.

I love the descriptions of Law:

Law Castille was an impressive guy. Always had been. He had always intimidated Tom, damn him anyway.

His bold profile presented toward Tom with a high, solid cheekbone, heavy jaw, and rounded chin. His full lips were seductive, cruel. His dark hair was corporately trim, but it looked soft. Tom couldn't see his eyes for his sunglasses, but knew they were striking, very dark with a hard, gemstone gleam.

He was bigger even than Tom remembered, sleek and massive as a prize bull. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up around his huge biceps. His muscles didn't have that distorted, outsized, veins-popping steroidal look. To make sure, Tom glanced down at his crotch. Steroids shrank the testicles. Nope. There was nothing small down there.

The black fabric of Law's trousers was drawn tight across his heavy thigh, showing the interwoven cabling of muscles underneath. Tom's cock lifted.

He tore his glance away and sank back into the bucket seat. Last thing he ever wanted was to get caught getting hard for Law. He wasn't sure where that had come from. Testosterone had reached critical mass in here. He didn't dare look back or he would turn into a pillar of-’okay, into a pillar. He stared straight ahead.

After the wedding, Law corners Tom in his apartment and you manage to write one of the best forced seduction scenes I’ve ever read. Tom is still convinced Law is straight and that he’s about to be raped by Law as a way to put him in his place. Tom has always been sure that he’s dominant, so to have Law threaten him and then penetrate him terrifies him . . . and remakes his world. You do an absolutely brilliant job of showing how very much Tom is both scared out of his mind and yet also desperately wants Law, and then showing how Tom remakes himself for the better in his new role and in his relationship with Law.

The conflict is very Old Skool Harlequin Presents: what does Law feel for Tom? Tom admits to himself very early that he loves Law and although the reader can see Law caring for Tom, his ruthlessness and his granite demeanor mean that Tom has very little idea of his role in Law’s life. The doormat to asshole ration that’s Jane’s way of measuring a good Presents is almost even. While Law’s an asshole, he’s a fun one without apologies or angst, and Tom is no one’s doormat. And the ending is pure Old Skool Harlequin Presents, too, with a full declaration of love at first sight and ruthless drive to the goal of stamping himself on Tom’s life and truly memorable grovel. Utterly, brilliantly perfect.

And I love your humor:

He flipped open the phone. "Hi."

Law didn't waste time with hello. "We're on the ninth hole, fishing Aquaman out of the water hazard."

Golf. What fun. "And what are you learning about your business partner?"

"He can't swim," Law said for starters. "And I really need to rethink my position with his company."

Tom grinned. "What's he learning about you?"

"If he were paying attention to this phone call-’and he's not-’he would know that I can be led around by my dick."

"I'm not leading you, Law."

"But you could."

I also love that the difference between Tom as a mechanic and Law as a billionaire is never an issue between them. Jessica at Racy Romance Reviews posted about this recently in her review of Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On. But unlike in Pretty Woman — which this book is obviously modeled on, down to the polo game — the class difference between Tom and Law is never an issue. And whether that’s realistic or not in real life, it’s completely refreshing in my reading. The conflict in this book is pure romance-angst about what Law feels, rather than Tom wondering whether he deserves Law or will be able to live up to Law’s lifestyle or whatever else he might think as a mechanic going out with a billionaire.

There is one completely shocking scene toward the end of the book that I don’t want to give away. But you’d written Law so well up until then that I could not only believe that he’d done what Tom thought he’d done, but could forgive him for it too, as Tom did. Perfectly done. I haven’t been on the edge of my seat reading a book in a long time the way I was with that scene and the aftermath of it.

The story is told almost entirely from Tom’s deep third person perspective. And while I always miss seeing the relationship from both sides when this happens, I think adding Law’s perspective as you do, late in the book, is actually unnecessary. The scene where Law receives a blackmail threat can be cut and explained when Law discusses it with Tom, and Law’s thoughts about his conversation with his mother could also be part of the denouement with Tom, rather than told from Law’s perspective. It just seemed a curious choice to add his perspective more than three quarters of the way through the novel when it’s not totally necessary to our understanding of the plot.

That aside, this book is, as I said, a complete gem. It took me back to my days of reading Harlequin Presents when I was thirteen, but with the twist of it being a wonderful, sweet m/m romance instead, told with humor and obvious caring. Thank you!

Grade: B+

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

This book can be purchased in ebook format at Torquere Books.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free. We do not earn an affiliate fee from Torquere Books through the book link.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Force of Nature by Kristina Cook
2. Hot Books for Fall: Spotlight on Avon/William Morrow
3. Publishers Trying to Force Anderson News Into Bankruptcy

Now that I’ve read three of your novels, I see a pattern in your heroines: they are extremely jealous of their independence, convinced that no man can be depended on, and afraid of showing themselves completely to the world.   I appreciate these qualities in a genre that too often holds its heroines to unreasonable standards of nobility, gentility, and congeniality.   All of which is another way of saying that I enjoyed Lori Love, the heroine of Start Me Up, and her difficult path toward the kind of happiness she had more or less given up on the moment she had to leave college and move back home to take care of her father and his car repair business.   I did not find the book to be as strong as last year’s Talk Me Down, but it was still very readable.

In Talk Me Down, we meet Lori as Molly Jennings’s childhood friend, a woman whose tomboy wardrobe, no-nonsense mien, and skills as a mechanic earn her a reputation as the town lesbian.   Lori has no real interest in changing anyone’s opinion of her, as the label gives her a certain amount of freedom from the expectations of others.   And Lori likes it that way, because she is having enough trouble not living up to her own expectations of what her life should be to comfortably accommodate anyone else’s.   However, Lori does have two strong desires that remain unfulfilled: one is to travel the world, and the other is to have a no holds barred, hot and dirty affair.   The first was sacrificed the day Lori left college and returned home to Tumble Creek and an incapacitated father (her mother having long abandoned the family).   And the second becomes immediately imperative from the moment in Start Me Up when Molly’s brainy, sexy architect brother realizes Lori is a girl.

Of course Quinn knows Lori possesses two X chromosomes, but it’s not until he sees her in a shapely blue dress with deep red high heels that he realizes she’s a woman.   And since Quinn spends most of his time in a sort of intellectual haze, the shock of being pulled out of his self-absorption catalyzes a powerful but somewhat uncomfortable (for Lori, at least) mutual attraction:

. . . "You were just asking me about dirty things, Lori Love.   Remember?   And then Quinn walks over here and stares at you like a raspberry truffle dipped in honey cream."

"He. . . A what?"

"I’m sorry.   That was too much, huh? Too erotica-y?   Too much creamy goodness?"

Lori wrapped her fingers around the stem of her martini glass.   "God, you are strange."

"Don’t change the subject.   Do you want to do dirty things with my brother or not?"

"No!" Her brain seemed to vibrate at the word, like an internal lie-detector test.   "Of course not.   I just fixed his backhoe.   That’s it."

"Got his engine running?"

"Stop it."

"Hey!"   Molly protested.   "I could have said something about being a hoe, but I didn’t."

Anyone who has read Talk Me Down knows that Molly is an erotica writer whose occupation has only recently become public knowledge.   Lori, who likes to read erotica, can’t help but be attracted to the hunky, Barbie doll dating Quinn, but she certainly doesn’t want to share that with Molly.   Which, of course, only adds to the forbidden nature of the attraction for Lori.   And Quinn, who has a terrible track record with remaining focused on a woman long enough to establish an actual relationship, is more than interested in volunteering for duty as Lori’s experimental stud, a position he learns about only when Lori turns Quinn down, wrongly assuming that Molly has told him of her interest.

Thus begins the unexpected dalliance, which Quinn juggles with his busy architectural firm and Lori tries to manage in the midst of offers to buy her late father’s riverfront property and mysterious incidents of vandalism to the garage.

In a traditional Romance, Lori’s vulnerability would bring out Quinn’s protective instincts, building the emotional bond between the lovers as Quinn keeps rushing to Lori’s rescue.   In Start Me Up, however, Lori doesn’t want to be dependent on Quinn, and so he never hears about the danger until later, building tension between them through Quinn’s frustration over Lori’s distancing and Lori’s fear that if she started to depend on Quinn she would most certainly end up hurt.

In many Romance novels, I would find Lori’s attitude an annoying and artificial means to delay the inevitable emotional bonding of the couple, but in Start Me Up, I understand Lori’s hesitancy.   After all, she has cultivated an image in town that has not exactly played on her female charms; her mother left when Lori was a teen; her own dreams have been deferred for less glamorous responsibilities; and Quinn has a history of dating extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily tall, extraordinarily shiny women, and he hasn’t exactly been focused on Lori in that way.   It doesn’t matter that Lori is pretty and sexy and appealing – she has set things up so that most people don’t see past the coveralls and the greasy fingernails and the tough exterior.

So in that sense it was quite a pleasure watching Quinn begin to chip away at Lori’s self-image, and I found it believable and frustrating in a good way that she resisted falling too hard for Quinn.   What worked less for me, ironically, is born of this same dynamic – namely that I didn’t get enough of Quinn to understand why Lori, of all women, was the one who managed to hold his sexual and romantic attention.   NOT because Lori’s physical charms were perhaps a bit more petite than Quinn’s other women, but because slack jawed surprise merely opens the door to sex, and what makes Quinn want more is not justified merely because the reader may understand Lori’s appeal.   In other words, even though I may be able to construe any number of reasons they work as a couple doesn’t mean the book has, in my opinion, done its job in effectively building the relationship beyond the bedroom.

Consequently, while I understood why Lori was both attracted to and a bit intimidated by Quinn, I did not have that same clarity from his side of things.   Take the moment he proposes that she come and live with him after things really begin falling apart around her:

"I want   you to come live with me."

"What?"   She’d worried he was about to make a grand declaration of love that she’d have to wiggle away fro.   But this?   This was crazy.   "I can’t come live with you!"

"Sure you can."

"I live in Tumble Creek" [note: Quinn lives in Aspen, across a pass that closes in winter]

"Come on, Lori.   There’s nothing left for you in Tumble Creek. You don’t belong there."

Lori’s jaw fell open.   He’d said it so casually, as if it weren’t her whole life he’d just tossed aside.   "It’s my home," she forced past her tight throat.

"It’s where you live, sure."

"It’s my life."

When he sighed, he sounded exactly as if he were dealing with a recalcitrant child.   "You don’t have a life."

. . . "You thought I could just move in with you, no problem."

He paused for just a moment.   "Yeah."

In one sense Quinn is correct; Lori has put all of her plans on the back burner, not even picking them back up after her father died.   But on another, deeper level, this is a guy who we are supposed to trust in his deeper than sex attraction to Lori who is seeing her here on a rather superficial level.   It is a conflict in the book that was never satisfactorily resolved for me.   And it reflects for me a larger tension between the upending of some genre stereotypes that occur throughout the book and a conformation to other genre stereotypes.   For example, I loved the way Lori is acutely aware of her class difference from Quinn and his circle, and the way she can articulate that so clearly – "an exotic taste of the underclass," as she puts it at one point.   And I appreciated the lack of judgment Dahl places on her characters’ sexual desires; as Quinn and Lori discover that they both enjoy power games, they are free to explore that without it having it reflect some deep psychological issues in either of them.

All of these things were refreshing and interesting, especially combined with the chuckle out loud moments in the text like the initial exchange I quoted between Lori and Molly, where Molly worries aloud that her description is "too erotica-y." Those moments of amusing and self-conscious referentiality become more significant the larger Dahl’s body of work gets, and they are a very nice touch.   If only Quinn had been constructed with that same level of textual depth, I think Start Me Up would have been an unqualified winner.   As it is, I found it an entertaining but not fully satisfying B-.

~ Janet

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Talk Me Down by Victoria Dahl
2. REVIEW: A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure by Victoria Dahl
3. REVIEW: The Wicked West by Victoria Dahl

I had two recommendations to read this book and so, while at Barnes and Noble for our what seems like weekly visits (there is not a Borders as close to me as the BN which is like a quarter mile from my house), I bought Romeo, Romeo. When I began to read it, I was a little worried.

The book starts out introducing our main players, Rosalie Ronaldi, and Nick Romeo. Rosalie, at the tender age of 27 and without an MBA, is one of the best corporate turn around execs in the business. Nick Romeo, at the tender age of 32, is the owner of one of the biggest chain of car dealerships in New York. Nick finds Rosalie on the side of the road in Brooklyn, kicking the flat tire of her car. She’s cursing in Spanish, justifying her profanities with the excuse that God actually gives you points if you curse in another language. Nick just happens to be driver a wrecker and offers to help Rosalie out.

Rosalie does act like a smart New Yorker and refuses, initially, to get in the cab of a strange guy’s wrecker even if he does look like Jude Law. Eventually, Nick convinces her that he’s harmless. Nick doesn’t tell her that he is Nick Romeo, the Brooklyn Donald Trump, and instead continues to perpetuate her mistaken belief that he is a mere mechanic.

Rosalie figures out pretty quickly who the Nick of the no last name is but she allows him to continue to lie to her because she thinks he’ll come clean at some point. Nick would come clean, but he’s got another nasty secret that could ruin his potential for a good time and so he doesn’t bring it up.

The initial two to three chapter have a lot of clichés and hyperbolic similes that seemed to be inserted to gain laughs but that I found to be irritating. Fortunately, that kind of forced humor was left behind and the story fell into a smooth readable rhythm.

The character’s physical descriptions relied on movie star references. Nick was a Italian Jude Law. Rosalie was a Sophia Lauren. Rosalie’s mom was a hot June Cleaver. I found the characterization of Nick to be inconsistent. On the one hand he’s supposed to be a domestic god, loving to cook, clean and take care of his women. On the other hand, he’s a selfish lout. Even at the end of the book, Rosalie defines Nick as a beer and pizza guy.

What I found particularly odd was this inability to decide whether Nick was an asshole or a guy who simply had commitment issues. More than one character called him selfish. From the minute he met Rosalie, Nick was busy tearing down his previous girlfriends who were botoxed, made up, and silicone filled. Why date these women if those things bother you so much, I wondered. I did wonder if the attempt to color Nick as an asshole was an attempt to refrain from making his domestic habits emasculating.

I liked Rosalie and felt she was more consistently drawn as someone whose parental marriage arrangement had scarred her for life. She was devoted to her job and wanted to have just a sexual relationship with Nick, no strings attached. But her character, too, suffered some contrivances. She had a set of three rules which she said she followed while dating. She never abided by them with Nick and they never became a real issue in their relationship which made me wonder why they were brought up in the first place. Finally, there was a contradiction in Gina’s character at the very end of the book to bring about a climactic scene.

Now maybe it sounds like I didn’t enjoy this book. I did and I would read another book from you. But it wasn’t a perfect, oh my god, book for me. I think this largely rests on two things. My take on the humor thing is different and I felt the character inconsistencies kept interrupting my immersion in the story. The funniest parts of the story, for me, where toward the end when Nick gets a lecture on groveling from his cousin, Vinny.

The conflict Rosalie grappled with was convincing. She did not want to be like her mother, married and mistreated. She clung to her independence believing that she would prevent ever becoming that pitiful if her life partner was work. Nick’s motivations for not being able to see he was in love was less up front that Rosalie’s and sometimes, because it was more hidden, I felt frustrated with his maintaining that he was just having fun with Rosalie and that he would tire of her soon, even though his actions were the exact opposite. Some of these irritants will not bother people at all and those looking for a straight contemporary will likely find this enjoyable. I did believe that Nick and Rosalie belonged together at the end. C+

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells. No ebook format.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Death in the Andamans by MM Kaye
2. REVIEW: Between the Sheets by Robin Wells
3. REVIEW: Death in Berlin by MM Kaye