A MARKED MAN

A handsome surgeon, a woman with a past and another predictable yawn from romantic-suspense-churner Cameron.

The Louisiana bayou parish of Toussaint (Kiss Them Goodbye, 2003) seems an unlikely place for the Savage brothers to open their new high-end plastic-surgery practice. But star surgeon Max has reasons to crave obscurity. Although he’s been acquitted of the crimes, two of his past girlfriends have been murdered, and that kind of past tends to shadow a man, even one so gorgeous he leaves women “trying to decide if they had seen him on the cover of GQ.” Lovely Annie Duhon has also come to Toussaint to hide, although she’s only traveled from nearby St. Martinville. Their attraction grows, but it takes sophisticate Max’s yearning for that urban rarity, bagels, to maneuver Annie back to her hometown for an ill-fated lunch that sets in motion demons from the past. Well, that and the horrifying dreams of fire and death that Annie has been experiencing. Can a local woman—her dialogue a weak attempt at French-Cajun phrasings—help poor Annie out? “That Annie, she is in danger,” says the local seer/pet-therapist Wazoo. “Folks laugh at me, but they not thinkin’.” Not everyone laughs in this oddly out-of-time backwater (“I don’t think I’ve ever seen down blankets in Louisiana,” notes one). Perhaps they should laugh, at least at the wooden dialogue and overlong sex scenes. In the hands of Cameron, a veteran of romance novels, sex is graphic and prolonged, but strangely clinical. Such descriptions as “the spasms of her climax clutched at his penis” dominate, and a minor character’s multi-orgasmic reaction to what is basically rape swings the effect from athletic to repulsive.

Cameron still has the heart of a romance writer, and readers are left in no doubt that Annie and Max will end well, no matter how many sexually exhausted bodies and half-developed plot lines float away down the bayou.