Dangerous [Hardcover]

my oh my I hate saying that. But please at roughly 20 plus dollars for a hard back and a thin hardback at that...please dont rush on buying. I love DP. She is my guilty pleasure. I admit it. I know the heroine will be naive to the point of tstl, I know the hero will be craggy, crabby, a rancher, a cop and a woman hater. Yes he will be all of that and as a bonus he will be a billionaire. I still love it but Dangerous was NOT worthy of being a hardback and even if it wasnt this bad and I hadnt shelled out the money, I'd still be disgruntled.

Kilraven is the undercover federal agent thats been working in Jacobsville. He's been pretending to be a regular cop when everyone knows he's something more. Winnie is Boone's sister and has of course the requisite crush on our hero. I'm thinking this will be good because even with Kilraven's dark past he has come across as a nice guy. He is nice in this story, although he assures Winnie that if and when they have sex that will be it because he's never getting married again. I was ok with this.its standard DP.

My problem is that there is almost no plot. The one thats there is so thin as to not even exist. Kilraven is looking for those responsible for the death of his family. He convinces Winnie that they must get married for real so that he can visit her summer home and accidently meet a woman that he thinks may have some answers about the killers that got away after murdering his family. That whole scene takes maybe 4-5 pages toward the end. The rest of the story is REALLY aweful dialogue between Kilraven and Cash as they make jokes and innuendo about his interest in Winnie, awful dialogue with his half brother Jon Blackhawk(a virgin hot FBI guy) making sly jokes about Kilravens interest in Winnie and awful dialogue with Kilraven and Winnie as they make NOT so sly reference to her obvious interest in him. ARGHHHH. This was not a wall banger it was a save my receipt and take right back to the store that sold it.

This had none of the fluidity that is usually in DP's stories, cheesy lines or not. Known of the sympathy for the heroine that I usually get because she's tstl. I couldnt feel any of that because the dialogue is bad and there are pages of it. More dialogue than narrative or plot. I felt like this was a half finished manuscript or outline.

I'm going to read some of my other DP hardbacks from last year so I can get the angsty guilty pleasure that I get from her books. Dangerous did not do it.

spoiler
**edited to add that it is 2 stars because the hero is the standard I've only had sex once in my life and it did have the virgin who will accidently get pregnant from the first time

I don't think I've read a worse contemporary book in years. I'm stunned that publishers considered Dangerous worthy of a hardcover release. It's clear that Diana Palmer has zero familiarity with gaming. Equally clear that she's not all that familiar with law enforcement. In fact, based on her writing, I'm wondering if she's familiar with 21st century life at all.

Our hero, Kilraven, is a fed working undercover. He's still haunted by the murder of his wife and three year old daughter 7 years before. And while he's aware that Winnie, our young heroine, has a crush on him, he's content to ignore her in the hopes that her feelings will fade with time.

Winnie has watched and loved Kilraven from afar for a long time. She keeps a frail hope alive that he will one day return her feelings. Her work as a 9-1-1 dispatcher keeps her in at least peripheral contact with him--even resulting her saving his life once due to her somewhat supernatural intuition.

Kilraven is at times callous, contemptuous of her feelings, and a real jerk. I really didn't care that he was still suffering. One minute, he avoids Winnie. The next he shoves his tongue down her throat. Followed by a stupid plan to use a "temporary" marriage as a cover for questioning a suspect.

Far worse than the "telling" way Palmer writes are the glaring inconsistencies in characters and plot. First, she shows our hero drinking a wine cooler, then a hundred pages later he claims he doesn't drink? Then we have the super naive, innocent too stupid to live 9-1-1 dispatcher who later references bondage?

I found the notion of "waiting until marriage" contrived and incredibly unbelievable here. As if a fake marriage was necessary to absolve these two people of having sexual feelings for each other. As if those feelings were unnatural or shameful. And as if divorce after sex was somehow more appealing than sex outside of marriage.

And as for the writing...I don't know where Palmer lives (or in what universe, really) but where I've lived, one doesn't "activate" a television. Unless you have a Wonder Twin power. You don't "activate" a cell phone either, unless you're turning on service for the first time. It's called turning it on. Powering it on. Clicking the remote. Not activating.

Equally annoying are her attempts to sell the reader on her gaming knowledge. In what are clear info dumps instead of characterization, she goes on and on about "gaming discs"-hint, they're just called games--then proceeds to practically door-to-door salesman pitch an Xbox 360 console complete with the names of various games. I don't need to know the entire game library owned by the characters. Especially when it seems obvious the author probably walked into an electronics store for a crash course on gaming and has never touched a controller or played a game.

I found the writing incredibly poor. Lots of telling rather than showing, which is understandable for a new author, but downright unforgivable for a veteran author like Palmer. But what really killed this book for me was the fact that the author seemed to be writing from isolation. Like she was stuck in a cultural time warp experiencing life through someone else's eyes. That prevented me from connecting with the characters, the plot, everything. And ultimately caused this book to fail badly with me.

FTC disclaimer: Digital galley received from the publisher for review.

I thouroughly enjoyed Dangerous. Read it in one sitting. Someone commented that Palmer doesn't know gaming, but Palmer is a gamer (she confessed to an addiction in another book) and even if not completely accurate I thought the games added a fun element to the story as all ages were hooked on the same games--made for camaraderie between varied characters. Perhaps she should just make up games from whole cloth so not to irritate gamers?

I had been looking forward to Kilraven's story ever since his introduction in the horrendous Fearless. Palmer is a guilty pleasure for me but this last year she has been on a roll with her Harlequin's (Diamond in the Rough is not to be missed for Palmer fans) and setting up this story to coincide on the timeline with The Maverick (Harley & Alice's story),

I enjoyed the interaction between Winnie and Kilraven. It is a given when you open a Palmer that the heroine is going to be virginal---(sometimes she jumps hoops to keep their virginity as in Beloved where the widowed Tira was married to a gay man LOL). But, with Winnie's over protective brother Boone, it was believable she was an innocent. I enjoyed Kilraven having not slept with anyone since his wife died. His cultural heritage and horrid sense of guilt and loss kept him so emotionally isolated that abstinance made sense. Many men lacking Klraven's strong moral compass would have resorted to excess drinking and meaningless sex. Frankly, I am sick of the male 'sluts' that seem to populate a lot of books lately, particulary those set in the Regency era.

While not perfect, I really enjoyed Dangerous and look forward to Jon Blackhawk's story later this year.

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