An entertaining mashup of Bond, beignets, and bondage.
A CIA hit man struggles to protect a woman from a revenge killer—and his own dark desires—in this debut erotic thriller.
Kael Brady, member of The Group, a “division within a division within a division of the CIA,” is in Jamaica, having killed his latest target the night before. He sends Zelie, his Taiwanese “asset” and willing BDSM sex partner, to the spa and meets with fellow agent Luke, another BDSM fan, on the beach. They check out local women, but Kael, somewhat haunted by both his profession and sexual proclivities, seems reserved. Then Rain Howard, a beautiful tourist from Raleigh, North Carolina, enters his view. Kael falls hard and convinces her to extend her vacation, to the dismay of Kael’s departing friend, Charlotte, who was a witness to his killing. The couple spends some sweet, sex-free time together, but the idyll ends when Kael learns that someone is out to take revenge on him and could hurt Rain. Kael leaves the island immediately to track down the potential killer. The novel then jumps ahead two years, with Kael arriving in Raleigh, believing the threat has passed. Rain, initially wary, soon succumbs to his overtures; she also ditches her corporate gig to open a cafe and become a professional beignet maker. She soon learns that she likes having rough sex with Kael. By novel’s end, though, they face a showdown with the surprising killer. Debut author Smith wisely has Zelie say, “What’s the big deal? Thanks to that stupid book, the BDSM lifestyle is totally normalized,” teeing up this novel’s Fifty Shades of Grey–type tone. Indeed, Smith’s erotica should please fans of E.L. James’ work, even if her couple’s enjoyment of asphyxiation may be too edgy for some. Her special-ops plot generally creates excitement, as well, although her use of multiple first-person narrators (mostly Kael and Rain, but also Luke and Charlotte) is ambitious, as is the introduction of an assassination subplot late in the proceedings. Still, Smith has plenty to spur on an ongoing series.
An entertaining mashup of Bond, beignets, and bondage.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61923-237-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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