Review: fun romp
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2012
Short but sweet sequel to The Hostage Bargain. I enjoyed it and will keep reading the series, which ought to merit a 4 star rating, but I also found the story to be pretty thin and the sex shoehorned into it awkwardly, so I'm dropping it down to three.The Wrong Turn is charming, with the same gleeful, irreverent embrace of a crazy plot, about a girl who's taken hostage by a gang of "hunky bank robbers" and then decides to join the group. But while The Hostage Bargain told a whole story, starting with the hostage taking and ending with the heroine's acceptance into the gang, The Wrong Turn feels incomplete - a piece of a story, a chapter rather than a whole volume.It starts with Isis (she's just Isis now) getting her ankle tattoo, cementing the events of book one. And it ends with her first active participation in a robbery, entering the bank along with her guys instead of waiting in the car. But, as Zeus, Odin, and Thor keep reminding us, robbing the average bank is child's play for these guys. Not a lot of planning or effort goes into the heist that serves as the novel's climax, so this robbery is more a symbolic marker of Isis' commitment to the group than it is a plot point.Instead we get a glimpse of an expanding world, when the God Pack goes out to meet some other criminal gangs at a swanky nightclub, and a really hilarious version of a "romantic date", where Thor keeps insisting that the four of them are "a couple". There are tons of awesome, funny moments - some of them are whip smart, like in the first chapter when Odin declares, "You need a new context," and others are hilariously silly, "His military background was as useful during sexual escapades as it was in robberies." Cute running gags, poignant moments. It's a fun romp.Negatives? The sex scenes don't fit organically into the story. (Okay, except for the one in the costume store - that was pretty awesome). And the writing felt hurried, less polished, than I expected.