Don't Look Down

This book's main problem is that it is actually two decent books with the exact same plot, cut up and interleaved to produce one rather mediocre book. Crusie co-writes this one with [a:Bob Mayer|19006|Bob Mayer|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1437136106p2/19006.jpg], who may write a decent manly-men with manly-weapons adventure book, (on which subject, remind me later to mention the one point of I-believe-unintentional hilarious homoerotic innuendo) but whose ability at writing a fluffy romance hovers at slightly above zero. I actually attempted to discover if this was because the book was being pushed in two markets, but as near as I can tell, it has only ever been published with the cover you see. On the basis of the cover given, one could be excused, I believe, for expecting a fluffy and amusing romance, not a tale of heavily armed men having shoot-outs in swamps.

Mayer writes the sections that are from the POV of the male protagonist, and Crusie the sections from the POV of the female protagonist. The result is that Lucy, the woman, seems likable, charming, and competent, and J.T. (I don't think we ever learn what that stands for,) seems to like guns and sex. Not that these are not satisfactory interests, but they really failed to make me care if he he lived or died.

I had to force myself to finish this book, and I don't think I so much as chuckled, which for a Crusie book, is a massive fail. Oh, homoeroticism! I think I chuckled at that. One moment, while I find it: damn, cannot find it, but, at one point, J.T. does think fondly of his days with the army as "Manly men doing manly things with other manly men," if I have the quote right. I laughed at that.

A while back it seemed like three-quarters of the book-related blogs I follow were a-twitter over Don't Look Down, the collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. Apparently, the idea of a book written by a romance author working with a suspense author was a Shocking Thing, as if nobody had ever written a romantic suspense novel before. This is not to say the book wasn't good, because it was--I just didn't find it nearly as good as the last thing I read because of blog buzz, which was His Majesty's Dragon. ;) HMD felt really new and different to me. This didn't, certainly not after reading, oh, say, J.D. Robb or Tami Hoag or Elizabeth Lowell.

There were aspects of it that really showed the romance-novel half of the creation, and which annoyed me a bit--things like the repeated attempts of the side characters to sic the heroine on the hero, the obligatory Gay Male Best Friend, the obligatory Precocious Child. The kid in particular was unevenly written, with her schtick of overly precise diction and lack of contractions being inconsistent; only when the dialogue gave up on that for her did she actually feel like a real character to me. (And to be fair, she also has some good mileage towards the end where she contributes to the action and yet remains a believable child character.) The hero and heroine weren't anything terribly out of the ordinary, though J.T. is likable with the whole thing he has going on of "incredibly competent when he's in Special Forces mode, a bit awkward and clueless at all other times" thing, and Lucy at no point ever does anything stupid.

Decent enough fluff read, though I had to slog a bit through the kid's stuffier dialogue and the interminable conversations trying to throw Lucy at J.T. Three stars.