The Book Gourmet

They meet in the wilderness of Alaska, when he saves her from being raped thanks to her being a lone woman in a small town of men. She immediately comes up with a plan—she’s a scientist in obvious need of a bodyguard, and he’d do nicely. She’s even prepared to pay him, but the only payment he wants is her body.


This one started off great. Slightly unconventional in its premise (the bargain between h/H), with a very unconventional hero, with hilarious convos and situations abounding.

By chapter five the hero started to get on my nerves with his single-mindedness and pushiness, the heroine was a blank with no discernible personality traits (a characteristic she shared with the hero), and the pacing was slow.

At about 50% they did the deed and she showed her true face. Me: Now we’re talking... *record scratch* We weren’t talking. Because the h/H turned into sex-craved idiots.
He woke tied up and (still) naked with her pointing a gun at him, punching him in the nuts, demanding something he stole. And what does he do? He forgives her, because she has holes in all the right places. That’s the reason I gleaned. Yes, he also talked about liking her for her spirit (a spirit I didn’t see, since she was a blank), about knowing she wasn’t who she said she was (having spent most of the time in his head through the 3 person POV, I didn’t realize he actually knew that), but I didn’t buy it. She was a convenient piece of meat with conveniently placed orifices.
And what does she do? This supposedly badass bounty hunter? She lets him convince her to untie him, because he was the first man to give her an orgasm. Not because of his personality, of her liking of him, of maybe some sliver of affection...Nope, she pivoted (again) because of his massive (his words—men and their delusions of grandeur), obviously hydraulic operated, pleasure-giving schlong.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

And what happened next? You think they’d left the cabin in search of whoever shot at them? Wrong! They spent the next chapters (I don’t know how many because I stopped reading by the third consecutive chapter of boning) fucking (yes, the only fitting word, because there was nothing there, no feeling and no emotions) like rabbits with no care that there was still someone out there after them. For a supposedly trained government assassin, this was a very stupid move.
Also, the constant boning pretty much obliterated whatever story or plot came before, as if the author used this medium to get it all out, to figuratively scratch and itch, and cram all the possible sexual positions and/or fantasies into one single story. But since there was nothing behind it, it read like porn, making the story appear a metaphor for a dirty magazine hidden inside a hollowed out book.
The language also quickly turned off-putting. I don’t mind dirty talk, but everything has its time, place, and context, and I think the motto “less is more” should’ve been applied here. Again, I had the feeling the author had a list of vulgar words from a Merriam-Webster dictionary and wanted to see how many she could cram into a sentence.

In the end, I just couldn’t take it. I officially DNF-ed it at 52%. However well it started, it didn’t continue at the same level, the characters were complete blanks, I couldn’t even picture them (how they looked) in my mind, which usually comes easy, the pacing was shot to hell, there was no feeling or emotions in the narrative, the plot disappeared somewhere around the middle mark...And I stopped caring.