Slow burn

Decided to give Julie Garwood a go since she'd been recommended to me, but apparently I picked the wrong book or something, because Slow Burn mostly just came across to me as Slow Bore. The blurb was promising, telling me all about how Kate MacKenna was being hounded by things blowing up everywhere she goes, and how said explosions were going to throw her across the path of two different men. And certainly we started off well, with things going splody around Kate as promised.

Except that after two explosions, we got a long stretch through most of the latter half of the book of nothing but conversations, and boring conversations at that. I will give Garwood at least some credit for writing out the conversations in a way that people would likely actually talk, except that the problem with this is that if you're too realistic with your dialogue, including every little offhand comment that a character might say even if it's a bit of a repetition of things that have been said before, it will totally throw off your pacing. I don't need to hear every little word that characters say to one another, especially if I'm reading what's supposed to be a suspense novel about a chick getting stalked by a killer trying to blow her up. I want the characters to stop yapping, and I want to see some things BLOW UP.

Also, I just didn't particularly like the heroine, which took a lot of oomph out of the book for me regardless. She went through the fairly standard waffling about whether she was in love with the handsome dashing hero, up to and including the standard cutesy little things he does that make her think she's got a zillion girlfriends and getting jealous over that. She flat refused to tell the guy she had any feelings for him, of course, and was completely and utterly blown away when he expressed his own sentiments for her, of course. And the heroine and her sisters were all too good and brilliant to be true; this particularly stood out when in one paragraph Garwood has the hero stand back and ogle all three of the women. Multiple sentences all over the book are lavished on how gorgeous they all are, and hardly any at all on what makes these women individuals. I got barely a sense of either of the sisters, who were mostly there to chirp supportive commentary at Kate and to try to shove her at various men to spice up her love life. Last but not least, what Kate chooses to do at the end as a result of a certain plot point that falls into her lap rang absolutely and utterly saccharin to me, and way too much along the lines of "look how virtuous and selfless this person is". Bah.

By the time we got to the ending, what with all the yap yap yap, I was almost too bored to actually pay much attention--but to be fair, the pacing picked up again once we got to the threat of the final bomb and things started. So I will give it points for that. I'll also give it points for handling of sex scenes--while the first one didn't do much for me in general, I approved of not spending too much time on subsequent occurrences of Kate and her guy making love when it had no particular relevance to the action at hand. And there were halfway clever ways of cutting to black with those, too.

All in all, Elizabeth Lowell and Tami Hoag have both done this kind of thing way better. Two stars, and I'll give an extra half for picking up again at the end, so two and a half stars.