Thursday 30 January 2014

#CBR6 4:Claim Me, Tawny Taylor

Pages: around 200 kindle pages
Time taken: 2-3 hours

Sylvie is the owner of a goth/fetish club whose office is the scene of the latest in a series of grisly murders. After the police leave, she finds herself in the company of Burke, who she presumes is a PI. In fact, he's a vampire who's been falsely accused of the murders, and he wants to clear his name. Sparks fly between the two characters, and upon realising that Sylvie is his Origo, a mystically ordained fated lover, Burke ravishes her pretty effectively. His mission to clear his name is complicated, however, by the discovery that Sylvie's other Master (yes, really) is Miko, the brother of the lead investigator into the murders, and sexy shenanigans ensue.

This book was laugh-out-loud awful. Seriously. Some of the smexy parts are okay (I added half a star for that), but some of them are pretty bad (hence it not being a whole star) - I found the BDSM bad and the threesomes okay, but YMMV. The rest of the book is just... wow. The plot could have made a half-decent book if it had place over a longer period of time and had not been secondary to the sex scenes. The characters were just awful; the narration is over-the-shoulder third person between Sylvie (so many exclamation marks! So little time between them!), the murderer (little sense of his character comes across, which was a waste), and Burke and Miko, who are practically identical in the way they think, act, and look, in as much as anything other than their rippling muscles and impressive cocks is described.

The exposition is really bad: Sylvie is perpetually confused about things - which I can't blame her for because neither Burke nor Miko bothers to tell her anything properly. The origins of Origos and Vampires are not discussed; the vampires can use magic, but they do it by snapping their fingers, and that's not explained either; Sylvie has a Small Dog Plot Device which gets abandoned at her one female friend's house and never mentioned after that; and the tropes followed are all clichés.

That all being said, I had fun reading it, largely because I was so amazed it got published at all. and there were certainly nuggets of good ideas there. It's basically the literary equivalent of my relationship with Burger King: every so often, I crave their fries, and I inhale a bunch of them, and then it triggers my IBS and I feel faintly disgusted with myself. This is like that. Only with words.

This is part of an anthology, The Alpha's Touch Boxed Set, and I have another 13 books to read in it. I am afraid for myself, but I won't stop reading it, just like the fries.

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