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MESMERIZED Simona Taylor BET/Arabesque January 2000 (2) by Melanie Schuster |
Contemporary Romance |
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PLOT SYNOPSIS: |
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REVIEW: |
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A very tiny young lady of my acquaintance has an adorable and specific response to being disciplined, especially when it involves a spank on the hand. She draws back and says in utter pique, “Where the love at?” This is the very question I asked myself when reading MESMERIZED—where the heck is the love??? Sean
Scott is a public relations manager for Orion Methanol in Trinidad.
She is thrilled to have the job because it aided her escape from New York
and the memories of her broken engagement. It also helped her to put the promise she made her late
father behind her, a promise that has exacted a great toll in her personal life.
Sean is in a fabulous job and a fabulous country when out of the blue,
her past catches up with her in the person of the company’s newest engineer.
He is none other than the man she thought he left behind, her ex-fiancé,
Christian Devane. Christian
is shocked to see Sean, but a part of him wants to pick up where they left off.
There is a lot of unfinished business between them, things left
unresolved due the misunderstanding that ended in their broken romance.
Despite all the years that have passed between them, the passion hasn’t
died. And in the face of political
upheavals and life-threatening situations, Christian is determined to discover
if there can be a second chance at love for him and the woman he never forgot. I
am sure that is what the author intended, because it’s all there, buried
beneath a whole lotta story. Chaos
ensues in the very first chapter with a blown up bank where Christian is injured
and the drama escalates from there. We
have voodoo-like priestesses with political agendas, industrial sabotage,
poisoned birds, bosses from hell, disgruntled ex-lovers and a secret from the
past that is destroying the heroine’s chance for happiness. Wow,
I had to sit back myself after I wrote that!
The thing is, all of these plot twists undermine, for me, the romantic
core of the book. I never got the
sense that these two had ever been in love or had any real reason to get back
together. Their time together was
so punctuated with head wounds, threats,
kidnappings and bombings that we never got to see any passion, any love, any
simple affection and therefore it was hard to believe that there was any basis
for a good relationship A little less plot and a lot more communication between the characters would have shown me the love and led me to a different conclusion altogether about this book. |
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2nd February 2000 |
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