Talk about your worst case scenario. When I was reading Simply Irresistible, I was drawn right into the story. For me, the immediate effectiveness was all due to character. Right away, I saw that Maggie was unappreciated, and that it was her fiancé Steven Dalton who was doing the unappreciating. The stage was immediately set for Steven's successor, and the timing of that successor's entry was perfection.

Steven's first words, "Vanilla -- plain, ordinary vanilla.” are a criticism of the heroine, and he gets worse from that point. He talks Maggie into playing out a public scene where she's a hooker, and he's her john. Maggie is seeing the wedding rings he'd promised, but Steven has some plans for her that are seriously disturbed. Their little adventure in role-playing is cut short when officer Case Roberts catches Maggie on a street corner propositioning Steven. Instead of staying to explain--after all, Maggie's a school teacher and he's a businessman--Steven leaves her high and dry. And arrested. Her paycheck, id, and coat disappear, so she can't prove anything. She agonizes during the ride to the pokey, which is one of the subtlest and most well done insertions of background exposition that I've seen in a long while. We learn of Maggie's small town Nebraska background, and her big brother Tom to whom she will not turn in her current crisis. And once behind bars, Maggie--who is most definitely not a hooker but who does have a heart of gold--makes friends with Roxie and Wanda, a couple of jailed hookers; she even arranges to give Roxie reading and writing lessons.

But officer Case Roberts looks pretty interesting. He and Maggie have some inevitable chemistry, which gets really interesting as the plot thickens. Let me just infer that with Case, Maggie is not as vanilla as Steven thinks.

Conversely, Steven isn't exactly the knight in shining armor that he pretends to be. Steven, in fact, is mixed up in all kinds of indefensible criminal activities, the details of which I can't go into or else I'll spoil the story. Just trust me when I say Maggie is infinitely better off without Steven. For Maggie's sake, it's a shame that when Steven abandons her to the law and walks off, it's not the last we see of him.

Case Roberts to the rescue.

Lucynda has great pacing. I like getting introduced to the jerk immediately, because it gets his whole introduction out of the way so we can get to the good part. (Case is the good part.) Case and Maggie are both very human, with internal conflict about their mutual attraction, understandable given their circumstances; and they're both good people caught up in an escalating series of sexual situations that will keep you on the edge of your seat. I am sure you will find Simply Irresistible to be a simply irresistible read with quick dialogue and characters to whom you can relate.

Maîtresse
Copyright 2006