Kazmaroff and Burton Number One: Three Shades of Puce
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
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Author: Susan Kiernan-Lewis
Title: Reckless: A Burton & Kazmaroff Mystery Genre: supernatural detective It’s a dead giveaway (Oooh! A pun!) that any free book advertised as having “more than N five-star ratings at Amazon|Goodreads” (where N is a large number) is self-published twaddle. I don’t’ know why I even bite on the email offers most of the time, but every once in a while I do. I guess it’s because sometimes I need to clear my “reading palate” – or perhaps I just need some crap for contrast once in a while. This time, the crap is a wannabe romance author who also wants to be a mystery writer, someone named Susan Kiernan-Lewis, and the book is Reckless, the first in the Burton & Kazmaroff series. Dear Lord, I can’t believe there are more… Mia Kazmaroff inherited the double-edged gift of postcognition from her mother: she can touch an object and “read” who and how it was used in the past. Oddly, the same gift allows her to read the current emotional state of people by touvhing them. That last is why Mia’s a virgin at 28, despite being drop-dead gorgeous and having full breasts and a marvelous ass. Jack Burton used to be Mia’s brother’s partner; homicide dicks in Atlanta. He’s always hated Dave Kazmaroff, but doesn’t know why. When Dave’s murdered, he quits the force only to be coerced into a PI partnership by Mia – combining her “gift” with his skill. Given that Burton lusts after Mia’s luscious ass, he reluctantly agrees. Their investigation reveals that every male in the APD is a horndog and every woman they meet is a slut, but they finally succeed – after Mia is kidnapped and tortured (but not raped, thereby retaining her virginity for Burton to excise at an as yet undetermined later date). Even for a first novel, Reckless (which some at the river say was previously published as Relentless with a heroine named Nuala), is pretty pedestrian. It draws on so many hoary tropes that there are too many to count, but some are quite evident. Of course there’s the requisite supernatural element of Mia’s postcognition, even if Kiernan-Lewis does confuse it with empathy most of the time. Then there’s the slavering lust of all the males in the plot (there are only three, four if you count the victim) and the constant references to Mia’s ass (at minimum six references to “perfect,” “gorgeous,” “round” and other descriptors). Oh, yes, and then there’s the obligatory coupling of every female character (save one) with the victim, complete with nude photos and a video of a suspect and the victim in a three-way, published on the net under her real name! With a substandard plot, hackneyed action, wooden characters and virtually no sense of place at all, Reckless: a Burton and Kazmaroff Mystery would have trouble making it to two stars. About all that saves it from earning a single star is that there are fewer grammatical errors and misspellings than your typical self-published wonder. That’s what I like to call “damning with faint praise,” though. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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