Review: Highly enjoyable read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 22, 2013
The Djinn's Dilemma was a fun and highly enjoyable read. The story is solid and sculpted to be a textbook classic ideal for the coming warm weather. The pace is fairly brisk, but there is ample time to fall in love with the characters. Basically, it's a perfect length to get a spot of sun (can you say vitamin D?) but short enough to not get burned to a crisp before the end.It's not the very best novel I've read this year, but I would without hesitation read this again (okay, maybe a few times and I'm not going to count). I liked the hero and heroine as they are built realistically with flaws and all of the quirks of the average person. Sarah, also known as Jasmine, is a story hungry reporter for a newspaper in Austin. The hero is named Rukh and he is by trade an assassin. I liked his name, but I'm not a hundred percent certain if I mentally pronounced it correctly. I imagined it to be along the lines of rook (like a chess piece, but there is no telling).The basics? Jasmine has been made a target for assassination because of a lead she's pursuing and doesn't realize it. Rukh is the one who has been hired to kill her, and he's a genie to boot (Irish and Middle Eastern). But when he sees the person that she really is inside, loving, warm, yet strangely closed to him and his powers, he is captivated enough to spare her.His fascination with her is the sole thing that saves her life on several instances as he intervenes on her behalf with her unaware for the most part. All Jasmine knows is that the handsome stranger is someone that she feels a bond with, but she is curious about who Rukh really is. Especially after she applies her journalistic skills to try and find out more about him and learns absolutely less than nothing. Well, unless you count the fact that the hero doesn't have a Facebook page to obsessively update, or shoot out tweets as a hobby in his spare time.The story is well-crafted and somewhat light in tenor, but with a delectable twist of intrigue and suspense. This read makes me wonder why I haven't perused a Harlequin serial in the last ten years. This book is definitely not part of your grandmother's aging but tidy collection of "well" hidden and beloved volumes stashed under the bed or inside of a closet. There is a thick smidgeon of smutty goodness (which I absolutely adore) so lovers of the erotic will get that oh-so necessary fix of naughtiness as an added bonus as well.-Reviewed by Jennifer