Smoke Screen

Smoke Screen

by Sandra Brown

Sometimes books end up on my reading shelf and I have no idea how they got there. I suspect there is a book god that steals books from airport lounges, public toilets and youth hostels and deposits them randomly around the world. It's the only logical conclusion as to why this book was there in the first place. Nothing about this book would have convinced me to put this book on the shelf willingly, but since everything on that shelf must be read, I picked it up and had at it.

I suspected something was amiss right away when the writer consistently referred to the varying tightness of each character's clothes, but it wasn't until the first contrived and graphic sex scene that my fears manifested:

"Oh God! I'm reading an erotic thriller."

Three solid pages of sex. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, like a good scare in a horror movie, I prefer my romance to be implied. Perhaps that is a personal character flaw.

Anyway,

Further reference to extra tight shirts, and heaps of unnecessary sexual tension later, the book took one last gargantuan twist that bordered on a leap of faith and ended.

Mercifully.

The gods mock me.