Book post: crime and romance
Mar. 25th, 2026 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterFire and Bones by Kathy Reichs: This is a Temperance Brennan novel, also of Bones TV show fame, chosen with no regard for series order but simply because it's the one my library happened to have available for immediate ebook download when I wanted it. This didn't seem to matter, as it usually doesn't in this kind of long-running crime series. There was some stuff about a relationship in the background that was clearly part of a longer-running arc, but it was pretty self-explanatory and neither took up much page space nor made any difference to the main mystery plot. That said, it was a very odd reading experience, in ways I don't think are accounted for just by not knowing Temperance's full backstory.
I devoured the book cover to cover! Could hardly put it down! And yet, I’m hard pressed to name anything I actually liked about it. My feelings towards the characters were best described as politely neutral; the murder case was not particularly exciting; the prose, ignoring its mature subject matter, wouldn’t have been out of place in a middle grade library. I guess I did enjoy the grisly grossness of the forensic work. The book opens on a vividly depicted scene of the protagonist sorting minutely through a huge pile of collected dog shit to find traces of the human remains they’re suspected of having consumed, which pretty much sets the tone for Temperance's work throughout the rest of the novel. I’ll also say this for the lacklustre prose, it does kind of work for the character and context: Temperance is not a wordsmith but a career scientist narrating her casework in first person, and moreover, she’s the kind of scientist who spends her days working on horrifically mutilated human corpses in high stakes criminal cases and has managed not to burn out yet. A certain emotional detachment, a lack of sensitivity or deep introspection, does make sense for her. (I can never say no to a good Watsonian excuse for a Doylist shortcoming.)
I saw a YouTube video the other day about books that are intentionally written to be as simple, action-oriented and compulsively readable as possible. The video itself was a rant about how BookTok romantasy is terrible and will probably cause the total collapse of literate civilisation (look, I was sick AND coming down with a migraine at the time, so I get a pass for resorting to shitty ragebait to distract myself) but this book kind of struck me as a crime-flavoured, older-audience-oriented version of the same thing. It felt almost algorithmic in how well calibrated it was to hold the reader’s attention while offering up relatively little in the way of actual content. And you know what, respect to Kathy Reichs; she clearly knows what she is doing, and as her decades worth of book sales testify, she does it well.
Naked in Death by JD Robb (AKA Nora Roberts): JD Robb is the penname Nora Roberts uses for her near-future, lightly sci-fi tinged crime/romance genre mashup novels. I did start this series in the correct order, at the strict urging of my mother, who has been dying to have someone to enthuse with about these books for ages and who pounced the moment I mentioned being in the mood for something quick, formulaic and exciting. This certainly fit the bill, although it also went to some dark places that I had definitely not osmosed to expect from Nora Roberts.
The protagonist Eve Dallas is a police lieutenant working in New York in the late 2050s. Guns have been outlawed; sex work has been legalised and heavily regulated for safety; despite these facts, sex workers are getting killed with guns in a string of clearly related homicides. Eve is assigned to the case as primary investigator, but her professionalism soon comes under threat from two directions: the nature of the case dredges up old wounds related to her own childhood trauma, while the romantic overtures of a mysterious, handsome, absurdly wealthy entrepreneur named Roarke start to win her over despite her best efforts to stay distant.
I'm biased because I had made up my mind to enjoy this book for Mum's sake before I even opened it, but honestly, I really did enjoy it a lot. The murder case is absolutely gripping and the pacing kept me hooked from start to finish; it was fast and tense and thrilling, but balanced the action really skilfully against the quieter moments of romance and trauma reflection. I would describe the prose as serviceable, but not in a bad way - it does its job without any particular literary flair, but it's not bland word puree like the Kathy Reichs novel. It's the kind of prose you just don't really notice one way or another because the focus is all on what's happening, and sometimes, especially in this kind of plot-driven genre novel, that's exactly what you want. The characters are engaging and well fleshed out by romance standards, and I adored Eve as a protagonist. She's street-smart and tragically wounded and full of courage and heart, and kicks ass in this nineties feminist way that feels slightly dated now - but charmingly so!
The romantic dynamic is also a little dated, but to be fair, I think contemporary romance might be a genre that dates faster than a lot of genres. Here in the 2020s, when I pick up a newly published romance novel, I expect the male love interest to be either a Consent King or a very specific kind of Dark Fuck Prince. Roarke as a 1995 iteration of the Bad Boy archetype has somewhat evolved beyond the primitive tactics of his bodice-ripper forebears but not yet embraced the formalised consent methodology of Christian Greys to come. I don't quite love him yet the way I love Eve, but Mum has promised me a tragic backstory if I continue on with the series, which if the rest of it are as enjoyable as this first book, I certainly will.
Deliver Me by Ashley Hawthorne: My adventures in pull-to-pub Reylo fic continue, and...oh, man. How do I even begin to review this one? I haven't had such warring feelings about a book since The Hurricane Wars. I think there's a common theme here where I have so much fannish goodwill towards these books that I give them leeway on flaws that would otherwise be an instant DNF, and then I end up enjoying them so much that I'm glad I gave them that leeway, but the flaws are still very much there and ARGH...
Let me start by saying that I unreservedly adore what this book is trying to be. It's about Mia, a Texan college student and devout (but very socially progressive) Christian who joins her Bible study's prison pen pal initiative and gets paired with Gabriel, who at 28 years old has been incarcerated since his mid-teens for the murder of his father. Mia soon comes to understand that Gabriel did not get a fair trial: abandoned by his remaining family, too young and traumatised to self-advocate, he was left to the mercy of an overworked, disinterested public defender and a media circus that the courts took no measures whatsoever to manage. His history of harrowing abuse and the desperate circumstances surrounding the altercation with his father were all excluded from evidence, and he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole when his mitigating circumstances should have reduced the conviction to second degree. He and Mia fall in love and begin a relationship through their correspondence; Mia becomes passionate about the brokenness of the Texas justice system and changes her major with the goal of becoming a lawyer; she also convinces a nihilistically resigned Gabriel to appeal his conviction in the hopes of a fairer retrial.
At the big-picture, structural level, this is a genuinely good story. It speaks directly and persuasively to the fundamental wrongness of carceral justice, as well as to the more specific tragedy of a particular kind of felon: human trafficking victims who are ensnared in a life of crime by their traffickers and see no way out when the system is as likely to blame and punish them as to offer help. It engages in a really nuanced way with the Christian faith: the same religion that gives Mia the courage to commit to Gabriel and fight for greater change in the criminal justice system is also the religion leveraged abusively against multiple helpless child victims in the story, and also the religion of the petty, hypocritical people within Mia's congregation who trade in judgemental gossip and look down on the less fortunate. One of the smaller-scale conflicts in the book arises between Mia and the members of her Bible study who were eager to participate in the penpal campaign as an act of smug Christian charity but are aghast when Mia starts to treat her penpal as an actual friend and taken an authentic human interest in him - doesn't she know that he's *gasp* a felon? All these different ways in which members of the church use and misuse God's love are given space to unfold in full without any attempt to make any of them cancel the others out.
I also loved the handling of Mia and Gabriel's relationship. On Gabriel's side - I mean, the guy's in prison. He's been in prison for more than a decade. No visitors, no letters, no nothing. His whole life is grim, grey concrete monotony, menial labour in the prison's factory, terrible food, hours and hours and hours of boredom, a cellmate he barely likes but can't escape. And now he's got a girlfriend! A real, live girlfriend writing him real handwritten letters full of details about life outside the prison cage, talking to him like he's an equal instead of an inmate, sending him very PG photos of herself that he can masturbate over furiously while his cellmate politely pretends to be deaf because he has zero privacy and zero other sexual outlet. He has literally nothing else good in his life to think about excepting her. And then on the other hand there's Mia who lives this sheltered, churchy life, who has received nothing but abstinence-only sex ed and has grown up expecting to become a pastor's wife and raise armfuls of children at home while her husband preaches, and now she's having this intense sexual awakening with a guy who she can't even physically access. You guys, this is so fucking hot. The DESIRE. The YEARNING. And as steamy and iddy and tragic-romantic as it all is, I also love that the book doesn't end on Gabriel's release from prison and they don't just ride off into the sunset together. Readjustment is really, really hard. Gabriel has never been a free adult, never had to develop the life skills anyone else takes for granted, never received any kind of treatment for his ongoing PTSD. The guy is a mess. Having a swoonworthy distance romance is one thing; learning to live your day-to-day life together as a couple, with one of you badly dysfunctional and the other one hopelessly naive, is another altogether. And this story takes that seriously.
So, yeah. There's so much here that I absolutely adore. And yet the execution - line by line, scene by scene - is really not good, and all the goodwill and love for the story in the world cannot justify me in trying to downplay that. This is a debut novel by an author who didn't spend a lot of time honing her craft before leaping into the world of publishing, and it shows. I wish Ashley Hawthorne had a better editor. I wish she'd saved this gorgeous, poignant story for a few novels down the track, once her writing skills were developed enough to give it the treatment it deserves. I wish I could edit it myself, in a far more hands-on, involved and assertive way than I'd be able to get away with if I were still working in tradpub, and whip it into the state of excellence I know it could reach with some technical guidance. Because the ideas are so good. The scope is good. The pacing is not perfect but it's also good. The details of the court and prison systems are under-researched but again, that's something an editor could help fix. I wish I could strip this story naked, throw out all the prose, all the awkward dialogue, all the unconvincing character interactions, and just hold the bare, disembodied themes and plot to my chest. It's so good! And so bad! GAH!
I devoured the book cover to cover! Could hardly put it down! And yet, I’m hard pressed to name anything I actually liked about it. My feelings towards the characters were best described as politely neutral; the murder case was not particularly exciting; the prose, ignoring its mature subject matter, wouldn’t have been out of place in a middle grade library. I guess I did enjoy the grisly grossness of the forensic work. The book opens on a vividly depicted scene of the protagonist sorting minutely through a huge pile of collected dog shit to find traces of the human remains they’re suspected of having consumed, which pretty much sets the tone for Temperance's work throughout the rest of the novel. I’ll also say this for the lacklustre prose, it does kind of work for the character and context: Temperance is not a wordsmith but a career scientist narrating her casework in first person, and moreover, she’s the kind of scientist who spends her days working on horrifically mutilated human corpses in high stakes criminal cases and has managed not to burn out yet. A certain emotional detachment, a lack of sensitivity or deep introspection, does make sense for her. (I can never say no to a good Watsonian excuse for a Doylist shortcoming.)
I saw a YouTube video the other day about books that are intentionally written to be as simple, action-oriented and compulsively readable as possible. The video itself was a rant about how BookTok romantasy is terrible and will probably cause the total collapse of literate civilisation (look, I was sick AND coming down with a migraine at the time, so I get a pass for resorting to shitty ragebait to distract myself) but this book kind of struck me as a crime-flavoured, older-audience-oriented version of the same thing. It felt almost algorithmic in how well calibrated it was to hold the reader’s attention while offering up relatively little in the way of actual content. And you know what, respect to Kathy Reichs; she clearly knows what she is doing, and as her decades worth of book sales testify, she does it well.
Naked in Death by JD Robb (AKA Nora Roberts): JD Robb is the penname Nora Roberts uses for her near-future, lightly sci-fi tinged crime/romance genre mashup novels. I did start this series in the correct order, at the strict urging of my mother, who has been dying to have someone to enthuse with about these books for ages and who pounced the moment I mentioned being in the mood for something quick, formulaic and exciting. This certainly fit the bill, although it also went to some dark places that I had definitely not osmosed to expect from Nora Roberts.
The protagonist Eve Dallas is a police lieutenant working in New York in the late 2050s. Guns have been outlawed; sex work has been legalised and heavily regulated for safety; despite these facts, sex workers are getting killed with guns in a string of clearly related homicides. Eve is assigned to the case as primary investigator, but her professionalism soon comes under threat from two directions: the nature of the case dredges up old wounds related to her own childhood trauma, while the romantic overtures of a mysterious, handsome, absurdly wealthy entrepreneur named Roarke start to win her over despite her best efforts to stay distant.
I'm biased because I had made up my mind to enjoy this book for Mum's sake before I even opened it, but honestly, I really did enjoy it a lot. The murder case is absolutely gripping and the pacing kept me hooked from start to finish; it was fast and tense and thrilling, but balanced the action really skilfully against the quieter moments of romance and trauma reflection. I would describe the prose as serviceable, but not in a bad way - it does its job without any particular literary flair, but it's not bland word puree like the Kathy Reichs novel. It's the kind of prose you just don't really notice one way or another because the focus is all on what's happening, and sometimes, especially in this kind of plot-driven genre novel, that's exactly what you want. The characters are engaging and well fleshed out by romance standards, and I adored Eve as a protagonist. She's street-smart and tragically wounded and full of courage and heart, and kicks ass in this nineties feminist way that feels slightly dated now - but charmingly so!
The romantic dynamic is also a little dated, but to be fair, I think contemporary romance might be a genre that dates faster than a lot of genres. Here in the 2020s, when I pick up a newly published romance novel, I expect the male love interest to be either a Consent King or a very specific kind of Dark Fuck Prince. Roarke as a 1995 iteration of the Bad Boy archetype has somewhat evolved beyond the primitive tactics of his bodice-ripper forebears but not yet embraced the formalised consent methodology of Christian Greys to come. I don't quite love him yet the way I love Eve, but Mum has promised me a tragic backstory if I continue on with the series, which if the rest of it are as enjoyable as this first book, I certainly will.
Deliver Me by Ashley Hawthorne: My adventures in pull-to-pub Reylo fic continue, and...oh, man. How do I even begin to review this one? I haven't had such warring feelings about a book since The Hurricane Wars. I think there's a common theme here where I have so much fannish goodwill towards these books that I give them leeway on flaws that would otherwise be an instant DNF, and then I end up enjoying them so much that I'm glad I gave them that leeway, but the flaws are still very much there and ARGH...
Let me start by saying that I unreservedly adore what this book is trying to be. It's about Mia, a Texan college student and devout (but very socially progressive) Christian who joins her Bible study's prison pen pal initiative and gets paired with Gabriel, who at 28 years old has been incarcerated since his mid-teens for the murder of his father. Mia soon comes to understand that Gabriel did not get a fair trial: abandoned by his remaining family, too young and traumatised to self-advocate, he was left to the mercy of an overworked, disinterested public defender and a media circus that the courts took no measures whatsoever to manage. His history of harrowing abuse and the desperate circumstances surrounding the altercation with his father were all excluded from evidence, and he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole when his mitigating circumstances should have reduced the conviction to second degree. He and Mia fall in love and begin a relationship through their correspondence; Mia becomes passionate about the brokenness of the Texas justice system and changes her major with the goal of becoming a lawyer; she also convinces a nihilistically resigned Gabriel to appeal his conviction in the hopes of a fairer retrial.
At the big-picture, structural level, this is a genuinely good story. It speaks directly and persuasively to the fundamental wrongness of carceral justice, as well as to the more specific tragedy of a particular kind of felon: human trafficking victims who are ensnared in a life of crime by their traffickers and see no way out when the system is as likely to blame and punish them as to offer help. It engages in a really nuanced way with the Christian faith: the same religion that gives Mia the courage to commit to Gabriel and fight for greater change in the criminal justice system is also the religion leveraged abusively against multiple helpless child victims in the story, and also the religion of the petty, hypocritical people within Mia's congregation who trade in judgemental gossip and look down on the less fortunate. One of the smaller-scale conflicts in the book arises between Mia and the members of her Bible study who were eager to participate in the penpal campaign as an act of smug Christian charity but are aghast when Mia starts to treat her penpal as an actual friend and taken an authentic human interest in him - doesn't she know that he's *gasp* a felon? All these different ways in which members of the church use and misuse God's love are given space to unfold in full without any attempt to make any of them cancel the others out.
I also loved the handling of Mia and Gabriel's relationship. On Gabriel's side - I mean, the guy's in prison. He's been in prison for more than a decade. No visitors, no letters, no nothing. His whole life is grim, grey concrete monotony, menial labour in the prison's factory, terrible food, hours and hours and hours of boredom, a cellmate he barely likes but can't escape. And now he's got a girlfriend! A real, live girlfriend writing him real handwritten letters full of details about life outside the prison cage, talking to him like he's an equal instead of an inmate, sending him very PG photos of herself that he can masturbate over furiously while his cellmate politely pretends to be deaf because he has zero privacy and zero other sexual outlet. He has literally nothing else good in his life to think about excepting her. And then on the other hand there's Mia who lives this sheltered, churchy life, who has received nothing but abstinence-only sex ed and has grown up expecting to become a pastor's wife and raise armfuls of children at home while her husband preaches, and now she's having this intense sexual awakening with a guy who she can't even physically access. You guys, this is so fucking hot. The DESIRE. The YEARNING. And as steamy and iddy and tragic-romantic as it all is, I also love that the book doesn't end on Gabriel's release from prison and they don't just ride off into the sunset together. Readjustment is really, really hard. Gabriel has never been a free adult, never had to develop the life skills anyone else takes for granted, never received any kind of treatment for his ongoing PTSD. The guy is a mess. Having a swoonworthy distance romance is one thing; learning to live your day-to-day life together as a couple, with one of you badly dysfunctional and the other one hopelessly naive, is another altogether. And this story takes that seriously.
So, yeah. There's so much here that I absolutely adore. And yet the execution - line by line, scene by scene - is really not good, and all the goodwill and love for the story in the world cannot justify me in trying to downplay that. This is a debut novel by an author who didn't spend a lot of time honing her craft before leaping into the world of publishing, and it shows. I wish Ashley Hawthorne had a better editor. I wish she'd saved this gorgeous, poignant story for a few novels down the track, once her writing skills were developed enough to give it the treatment it deserves. I wish I could edit it myself, in a far more hands-on, involved and assertive way than I'd be able to get away with if I were still working in tradpub, and whip it into the state of excellence I know it could reach with some technical guidance. Because the ideas are so good. The scope is good. The pacing is not perfect but it's also good. The details of the court and prison systems are under-researched but again, that's something an editor could help fix. I wish I could strip this story naked, throw out all the prose, all the awkward dialogue, all the unconvincing character interactions, and just hold the bare, disembodied themes and plot to my chest. It's so good! And so bad! GAH!
