by Amanda Quick (Jayne Ann Krentz)
2009 GP Putnam (Penguin)

First sentence: Lucinda stopped a few feet away from the dead man, trying to ignore the fierce undercurrents of tension that raged through the elegant library.
Clichés in three successive sentences, written while the author was eating a frozen lemonade:cool and composed, as cold as ice, chill her to the bone
Pairs well with: oatmeal, dry toast, iceberg lettuce, lite beer, unsalted nuts, dental appointments and broken marriages

Jayne Ann Krentz needs to spend more time creating characters and less time writing 122 shitty novels. Krentz is another author of “genre romance”, a genre we last met with Spellbound by Patricia Simpson. But rather than being shitty and charming, this is just shitty and crappy.

In three pages she introduces the following characters:

• a Scotland Yard Inspector who is stout, cheerful, has a voluminous mustache and a “psychical gift” for noticing small clues at a murder scene
• the “severe-looking” spinster sister named Hannah Rathbone
• a handsome man named Hamilton Fairborn, with his “well-modeled” jaw
• a coterie of offended Victorian ladies

I wasn’t sure if I was reading a novel or playing a game of Parker Brothers Clue. It seems Jayne Ann Krentz gets her novel ideas from watching Masterpiece Theatre knockoffs on the Mexican PBS (which is likely acronymed “BSP” or “SBP”).

Krentz has published six to seven thousand novels (the exact number is not known by modern science) under seven different pseudonyms, in part because she is so embarrassed about everything she writes, and in part because she has killed six other authors, all of them shitty, and assumed their identity. The editor of her page on Wikipedia (who is really Krentz working under the pseudonym “James Patterson”) points out that “Krentz created the futuristic romance subgenre, and further expanded the boundaries of the genre in 1996 with Amaryllis, the first paranormal futuristic romantic suspense novel”. Paranormal indeed.

I considered suicide once for every verb in the first three pages. Luckily shit hardly happened or I would be dead right now.

Other reviews: Jandy’s Reading Room, Working Girl Reviews, Penelope’s Romance Reviews, More Vikings

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